Over the Weekend: Adventures in Kaiserreich

The past two weeks have been pretty exciting for me, gaming-wise. I spent the first half of the week continuing to play Borderlands, and got in a little bit of playing time with Dragon Age: Origins starting on Thursday. I had a LAN party over the weekend with a few friends of mine, and as such I don't have enough to write about DA:O yet.

Kaiserreich, the game that I played over this weekend, is another matter. Kaiserreich is a mod for Paradox Interactive's Hearts of Iron II that simulates an ahistorical World War II scenario in which the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire) won World War I instead of the Entente (World War I's historical victors).

I'm a huge fan of complex simulation games. As a kid, Sim City 2000 and Civilization II were probably my two favorite games, and I've spent countless hours playing their successors, Sim City 4 Rush Hour and Civilization IV. My favorite aspect of playing games is that it gives me the opportunity to try hundreds of different experiences, and battlefield/theatre of war command games present an entirely different experience from almost anything that you could find in the real world. Europa Universalis II (which I'll probably write about later this week thanks to its recently-released For The Glory expansion) was the first game that got me hooked on the nation-building genre, and is still my favorite, but I've also really enjoyed playing Paradox's Hearts of Iron II.

In my opinion, Paradox's offerings, while they can be a little buggy and difficult to learn, are far and away the best strategy games out there. While the Total War games have comparable campaigns in terms of scope, they are really battlefield simulations tucked into a shallow framework that gives meaning to each battle. Paradox's games tend to eschew the traditional battlefield focus in favor of diplomatic, economic and societal focuses which emphasize the difficulty of effectively governing and building a nation rather than simply winning battles. They also generally allow players to play as any number of different countries or government entities which existed at a certain point in history, rather than limiting players to a handful.

Hearts of Iron II, being the most war-focused Paradox game, has more in-depth combat mechanics than other Paradox games. Still, the emphasis of the game focuses on fielding a strong army rather than scheming unique strategies for individual units. Within the main game, there are several different screens which allow you to control nearly every aspect of your country and its government.

After selecting a country and scenario and starting the game, you will be presented with a map of the world and several different game screen options from which to control your nation. On the main screen, you can see a map of the world, and a summary of your resources, along with lists of provinces, army units, navy units, and air units you control. Additionally, You can view the world map in a number of different ways, as there are several different map modes. The territorial map is pictured at right, but there is also a terrain map, a weather map, an economic map, a supply map, a revolt map, a victory point map, a diplomatic map, a region map and an area map. Each province is clickable, and doing so provides details about its terrain, resources, owner and controller, industry, transportation network and more. Units are also visible and can be issued commands on this screen. Finally, there are several tabs above the map which allow you to visit the other five main game interfaces. In the next few paragraphs, I'll discuss some of the more relevant ones.

The technology tab allows you to view the technologies that you will produce throughout the game and control your nation's technological research. On the left side of the screen are a number of "technology teams" which are used to research technology. Each nation can research between one and five techs at a time, but can have many more tech teams than these. Each of these tech teams has a skill level and individual specialties, as noted by the small icons under their name. While skill level provides a base rate of research, specialties increase that rate when a team's specialties match the specialty demands of a particular tech. Put in simple terms, specialties mean that you will want tech teams like Ford working on tanks and motorized infantry research while leaving nuclear weapons research to Albert Einstein. There are many, many different techs available in the game, so your teams will always be busy.

The production tab allows you to control your nation's economic activity. The two most important areas for any country are at the left and upper right portions of the screen. The left side of the screen is devoted to production, and allows you to build implements of war as well as infrastructure. As you can see in the screenshot, Italy is currently producing a series of motorized infantry units, a battleship, a tank, another motorized infantry unit series, and a bomber. However, due to its limited production capacity, only the first three are currently being worked on. Green units are currently being produced at full capacity, while yellow means that a unit is being produced at partial capacity, and orange means that a unit will not be worked on until objects above it in the queue have finished or production capacity is expanded.

Production capacity is controlled at the top right of the screen, along with several other economic activities. The total amount of economic activity for a country is equal to its modified IC, which stands for industrial capacity. This IC is divided between five different economic activities, namely consumer goods, production capacity (the topic of the previous paragraph), supplies, reinforcements, and upgrades. Consumer goods are required to keep the populace happy, especially during times of peace. During times of peace, citizens are willing to accept less consumer goods. Certain government choices can also reduce the amount of consumer goods an economy requires. Most players think of consumer goods as simply mandatory wasted IC, which is true in many cases. Consumer goods also supply money, which is used by tech teams to conduct research at full capacity. Supplies are consumed by army units at all times, and can also be traded away. Reinforcements allow you to place lost soldiers, while Upgrades allows you to upgrade obsolete units after your tech teams make new technological discoveries.

All of this economic activity requires resources, which can be found to the left of the production sliders and on the main screen. IC requires energy, metal, and rare materials to function, and all units require supplies and sometimes oil to operate effectively. You can track your production and consumption of these supplies on either screen, but there is also a trading interface if you are endowed with an excess or shortage of a particular resource.

The last main screen is the diplomacy screen, which allows you to control your nation at its highest level. Political orientation sliders are a hallmark of Paradox games, and Hearts of Iron II is no exception. Each nation has its own set of sliders which dictate its government type, values, and several different aspects of its society. For example, the Italian Federation (a reactionary federation of Italian states governed by the Pope in the Kaiserreich scenario) has a National Populist style of government with a closed (controlled) society, some free market enterprise. It also has a standing army, and its ruling body is hesitant but willing to go to war generally. However, given the current state of the world, they desire to intervene in current conflicts and world affairs. Each of these sliders has a different set of effects on player's diplomatic and economic options; for example, the Interventionism/Isolationism slider controls the cost of conducting diplomacy, the difficulty of normalizing relations with other countries, the amount of dissent created by declaring war, and the level of consumer goods that its populace demands. Global events, the influence of other nations, and even the player can control the orientation of the sliders throughout the game.

Also featured in the diplomacy screen is a list of government figures, which can have smaller but more manageable effect on a country. Most of these figures can be replaced at a cost of some dissent, which in turn reduces IC. However, the Head of State and Head of Government can only change from events, such as elections (which you will receive every few years in a democratic country), or deaths/coup d'etats (generally in more authoritarian societies).

On the left side of the diplomacy screen is a list of all countries in the game, together with a list of excess resources that they produce. As you might imagine, diplomacy and trading can be conducted from here. In the center of the screen is a list of the currently selected nation's diplomatic relations, along with its belligerence rating, which is basically a measure of naughtyness which controls the willingness of other countries to declare war on it, and the cost of declaring war on it. In the top right corner of the screen is a list of diplomatic actions that you can take on that country.

As you can see, the control that players have over a nation's affairs is already quite comprehensive. Yet once war is declared players must also manage their nation's army in war. War is conducted in a much more macro sense than most other RTS games, but is still more strategic than other games with a similar focus, such as Civilization. First of all, nations tend to specialize in one or several unit types that are a reflection of its resources (it is hard to field an army of tanks if you don't have much oil to run them) and its warfare doctrines, which are developed on the technology screen. Army composition generally determines the best way to fight with an army. However, there are also other considerations. Armies attack and defend more successfully when they have support from adjacent territories, air support from fighters or bombers, if their landing beach has been shelled before attempting to land, and if they have the proper equipment for fighting in certain conditions (for example, tanks don't fight well in hills, mountains, or cities). They fight less effectively when crossing rivers, when they have been repeatedly bombed or shelled, are cut off from supply, or are being flanked from one or more sides. The tactics of World War II are reproduced fairly effectively (encircling troops through the use of blitzkreig is the best way to deal with them), and the AI does its job reasonably well in combat. All in all, while you are still only giving general move, attack and context-sensitive support commands to your troops, Hearts of Iron still does a good job of giving you a feel for combat.

This post ended up getting pretty far off-track from what I originally wanted to discuss, but I will try and salvage some value regardless. If you like strategy games and are looking for something different, I highly recommend giving Hearts of Iron II or Europa Universalis a try. They are very difficult games to learn, but the payoff, in my opinion, is well worth it. There is simply nothing like it.

-Jon