Since finally caving in and buying Hearts of Iron 4, I have been quite enthralled with it. That is, until our house’s main computer decided to stop responding to inputs from the keyboards or mice. Near as anyone can tell, the computer is fine, but without it can’t do anything. Left without my game, I have felt compelled to contemplate on what I like and don’t about it. Hence, this review.
For all of the complaints that Hearts of Iron 4 has a steep learning curve, I managed to get a (very basic) handle on the mechanics after only a few hours. Admittedly some of this might be because I have experience in other games, like Age of Empires, or because I’ve seen videos from YouTubers who play the game competently. Also I am what most people would call a history buff, meaning I can tell you not only what the Manhattan Project was, but what the Office of Strategic Services did, what Liberty Ships were, and why the United States was almost unbeatable by 1942, especially combined with other allies; but by the same coin, had to put in extra effort to put their finger on the scales in Europe and Asia.
Needless to say, I played my first game of the United States. Or rather, I started as the United States, but quickly got bored of simply waiting for things to happen while the American people couldn’t be bothered for anything because of the ongoing Great Depression. Democracies, in this game, have all sorts of limitations that limit their early game potential and make them merely reactive. So instead of just sitting and waiting for stuff to happen, in my timeline, by early 1939, revolution was sweeping through the United States. The newly-instated Communist States of America rapidly began rearming the country, preparing to spread the revolution across the continent. Despite lofty promises, the military campaign to liberate the Mexican proletariat proved decidedly more difficult in practice, and the planned encirclement of the Mexican Army failed spectacularly. American forces, who in many places were still equipped with outdated WWI equipment, were forced back into Texas.
The Communist States eventually won the war through sheer numbers, securing Mexican industry and manpower for the Comintern. The CSA continued pushing through Guatemala and Honduras, only stopping at the Panama Canal. Plans to invade Canada in a similar fashion were drawn up, but quickly shelved as Nazi Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Nazi advance was quickly blunted by American air power, and American lend-lease weapons. Nevertheless the eastern front quickly devolved into a stalemate of back and forth while Soviet troops stalled for time as their American comrades worked their way from their ports in Siberia.
The war quickly became one of attrition, and in this, it was colossally one-sided. Whatever the Nazis threw at the meat grinder, the Comintern would match them for. An abortive attempt was made to open up a second front just northwest of the Dutch border, but though the landing went well, and early progress was made, in the excitement and confusion, the landings were never reinforced, and were quickly driven back. The divisions that died in the landing did not die in vain, however. For the distraction in the west gave the Comintern the opening they had needed to begin the march to Berlin.
For some inexplicable reason, Spain under Franco, and Japan, took this moment to throw their lot in with the beleaguered Axis. Perhaps they feared a Europe dominated by the Comintern, and knew that their chances of victory would only grow more slim with each passing day. Perhaps the AI in Hearts of Iron doesn’t understand self-preservation. This needn’t have mattered, except that it was at this point that I learnt a very important lesson about checking whether countries had joined a faction between the time I started preparing an invasion and when I declared war. Apparently Iceland, which I had been planning to use as a new naval base, was now part of the Allies, and in declaring admittedly frivolous war on them, I brought the Allies into the war against the Comintern.
Of course, Comrade Bowder had never really trusted the British anyways. In fact, about half the army was stationed on the Canadian border. In stark contrast to Mexico, the Canadian campaign was a cakewalk. American motorized forces raced around the northern tundra, encircling the confused home guard divisions, who were expecting a mock German invasion as part of Canada’s “If Day” campaign, not a real American one. These triumphs in the north were tempered by news from Western Europe, where advancing American forces, hot on the heels of the remnants of the Reich, suddenly found themselves cut off by the very countries they had been liberating. The European Front became a massacre.
By late 1943, the war had settled in to something of a stalemate, with the Comintern controlling Europe north of the alps and east of the Rhine. In Asia, Mongolia and Manchuria changed hands almost monthly. The Americans kept up a mixed success rate in attempting to seize nearby British possessions by amphibious landings. American ports churned out endless fleets of screen vessels with the occasional capital ship, attempting to keep the routes to its trade partners open. In an attempt to break the stalemate, many of the Canadian provinces were put to work on producing nuclear materials. The first Atomic Bomb was dropped in early 1944 on a small town in the Netherlands where the fighting had devolved into a bitter stalemate. Comintern forces did achieve their breakthrough, but the destruction of major infrastructure prevented the breakthrough from being exploited. Over the coming weeks, dozens more bombs would be used by the Communist States of America across various fronts.
The main bottleneck to my winning was, at this point, production. I had more than six million men ready to be drafted, but nothing to arm them with. I could barely supply the troops I had (insert communism joke here). The bottleneck to production was resources. I lacked access to adequate Tungsten, Chromium, and above all, Rubber. Declaring war on the allies, while it had given me access to Canada’s factories, had cut off my main sources of all three. This problem only got worse when my main trading partner, the Soviet Union, closed their economy to outside trade to fuel their own war machine.
And then I read online that, actually, I could just make more rubber. I could synthesize it, if I built synthetic refineries. Which I hadn’t, because I had gotten it in my head (somewhere) that refineries were for oil, so I hadn’t even researched the technology. I also didn’t have building slots to spare at this point.
I wanted to argue a bit against the notion popular in reviews that Hearts of Iron has a steep learning curve, because that’s not quite accurate. I actually found most of the controls themselves intuitive enough. The game even does a decent enough job of notifying you when things are going wrong, at least as far as proximal causes go. Where the game has trouble is in tracing these proximal causes back to bottlenecks that can be fixed. For example:
Your invasion… err, liberation… of the United Kingdom has stalled. You know this because your troops are still in marshaling areas at Norfolk instead of London. Okay. You go to find the commander of that task force to give a talking to, and he says he called it off. Why? Because he’s concerned the mid-Atlantic isn’t fully under our control. Why isn’t the Atlantic an American Lake? Because the fleet you assigned there decided to head back to port. Because its ships got dented by those pesky British subs. It’ll be done repairing… soon…ish. So you look to deploy more ships, only to find your shipyards have also been taking a break. Because you lack Chromium. And good luck finding more. Because the only country that has Chromium that’s not at war is Sweden. And Sweden hasn’t delivered. Why? Because there’s an ocean in the way. An ocean filled with British subs. The ones that you need your navy to beat. Your navy that needs Chromium.
Even though the story here is relatively straightforward, every sentence here is buried on a different tab. Once you’ve figured out that it’s a shipping problem in Sweden, and everything trickles down from there, it’s relatively straightforward to come up with a solution (most of them involve invading Norway). But figuring out the issues is, sometimes literally, half the battle.
This problem is somewhat exacerbated by the pace of the game. Hearts of Iron measures in-game time in hours. This is fair enough when tearing through undefended countryside in a motorized division, but gets a little slow during the moments in between, or even along a static front. Of course, part of this may be due to my computer, which, while it meets the minimum specifications (or used to when it still worked), isn’t new by any stretch. The time on my computer doesn’t seem to pass as quickly as it does on videos of other people playing.
Computer issues aside, the game still involves a lot of waiting. You have to wait for factories to be built, for materiel to be produced, for troops to be trained and marshaled, for fleets to be assembled, etcetera. Even on a fast computer, this takes hours, if not days (real time). Hearts of Iron alternates between short, staccato bursts of activity, in which you scramble to give orders to all of your divisions at once, and long periods of buildup and regrouping. You can speed up and slow down time, but in my experience this still isn’t fast enough to power through the slow bits. Indeed, I have played almost the whole game at maximum speed, and in many places it still felt too slow.
In 1944, the Comintern navies finally got the upper hand in the battle for the Atlantic, paving the way for the American invasion of the United Kingdom. Supported by liberal use of nuclear weapons across the European continent, American forces moved from Plymouth towards London. As American motorized forces raced north to secure Scotland and jump into Northern Ireland, the remaining British forces desperately shifted their forces across the Channel, abandoning continental Europe to defend the holdouts in Dover. British forces held firm, but were overrun, as were the remaining western enclaves in France and the Low Countries. By 1946, the Americans had used their nuclear arsenal to force an encirclement, trapping most of the Spanish frontline and what remained of Vichy France, and causing the last major power in Europe to capitulate. The bitter mountain campaign continued, but this was a mere distraction for the Comintern.
The remaining exiled British forces fought on in India, but as American forces arrived in greater number, the front slowly inched closer to the last major allied capital. In the Far East, Atomic bombs rained down on Japan, shattering any pretense of industry. Still, having yet to lose ground in battle, the sole Axis power would not surrender. At this point, a victory on either front would mean an effective end to the war, particularly as killing either the allies or the Axis would allow the Comintern to consolidate their resources. The rubber shortage had by 1946 been mostly alleviated by synthesis, but Chromium remained in short supply.
In 1947, India surrendered, triggering a conference of the major warring powers to divide up the world. For some reason, the Soviet Union decided to take Canada, which I had worked quite hard to build up after liberating it. Despite this, they didn’t seem too concerned about how Europe looked. So I took most of Great Britain, except for London, where the USSR installed a puppet government that controlled the city as well as… Italy, apparently. I took most of costal France, and a few bits and pieces in the balkans, India, and Africa that would give me the Chromium I needed to continue prosecuting the war against Japan.
The Home islands were taken that same year in an amphibious invasion that took the Japanese completely by surprise. That should have been the end of it, but the game decided that the real powerhouse behind the Axis was Reorganized Nationalist China, that is, the puppet government installed by the Japanese. And this is where things bogged down again, because while WWII-era China may not have much in the way of infrastructure, or technology, or planes, or a navy, or logistics, they do have a seemingly endless reserve of men to absorb all the munitions the Comintern can produce, be they conventional or atomic.
Worth noting- the way the game handles atomic bombs is interesting. Rather than act as world-ending weapons, they inflict a decent, if somewhat disappointing amount of damage, and, rather than bring your opponent closer to surrendering, instead they lower the threshold, which is calculated by what percentage of major cities a nation holds. This means that A-bombs are helpful to give your opponent a nudge, but you can’t win a war just by throwing nukes at the enemy while you sit back in your bunker. From a game mechanics standpoint, this is a solid approach. Unfortunately, it means that you can fling scores of bombs at an enemy until you run out of targets, and your enemy is no closer to surrender than when you started. It also means that using nuclear weapons to support a ground advance is only effective in marginal cases.
At the beginning of the game, there were seven countries the game recognized as great powers. By 1949 there were two remaining that weren’t puppet states. Who would’ve won in a showdown is an open question. The USSR had far more troops in the field (in all of the fields, because apparently Zhukov didn’t feel like moving his divisions to the front), but my Communist States of America had more factories, and had lost far fewer men in the fighting so far. I had also already been preparing for a 1984-style betrayal, building fortifications, stationing troops to man them, and keeping enough planes and rockets on standby to begin bombing Moscow if need be. On the other hand, nearly every country was already in the Comintern, and so chances were good that it would be pretty much the whole world versus me. And while I could out-produce the Soviets, I wasn’t sure I could take on the rest of the world combined. I could try and make a bunch of them switch, but that would take time, and the game clock was running out. Also, my computer was already sputtering with the number of divisions it had to render, and I didn’t think it would be terribly happy with opening up even more fronts.
I made a lot of stupid mistakes during my first game. The whole rubber debacle comes to mind, as does accidentally declaring war on the allies before I was ready. I also managed to have multiple amphibious invasions fail spectacularly because I forgot to order them to take a port from which they could be supplied, and as a result by the time I went back to check on them, they were starving to death and couldn’t be bothered to move. My troops had a knack for advancing into places where they could be supplied, and subsequently developed a knack for losing whatever equipment they were issued. Perhaps there’s a way to fix this, so that the largest economy on the planet isn’t struggling to supply its soldiers.
The game does take some patience and willingness to learn, but it is eminently learnable. Much of the minutiae which makes the difference between a smashing victory and a pyrrhic one aren’t fully detailed in the tutorial, and so have to be looked up online or intuited, but despite criticism, the game is intuitive coming from the proper stratego-historical (according to the original Greek declensions, this is the correct way to say that) headspace. This game is not easy, and it is certainly not simple, but it is great fun for the right person. I enjoy it, and as soon as our computer can be brought back into line, or I decide to finally set up my laptop, I shall continue to enjoy playing it.