![]() Research is a simple matter of picking the next item in the research tree- with variants available for purchase based on battle experience. You can switch your factories to build whatever you want at any time, but changing to a completely different item of production requires retooling of the factory and results in a temporary penalty to production. ![]() The production interface makes where to direct you attention obvious, telling you which light tank you need to produce and which support weapon you already have enough of. ![]() If military factories (used for producing items of military use) out of work, it was obvious. If I had civilian factories (used for building more factories, fortifications, infrastructure, trade and a number of other functions) being unused, I knew. A well-designed interface and alerts pointed me at the points that needed attention. In Hearts of Iron 4, everything is much more obvious. Building the German war machine was not an obvious thing- learning the ins and out of economy and production was tough. I’d always found the 1936 start in Hearts of Iron 3 to be overly intimidating. I, however, jumped straight into a 1936 playthrough as my Hearts of Iron 3 standby- Germany. As the tutorial ends, you have the option to continue with an Italian playthrough, giving you the ability to put all you learned to the test. It’s informative, showing the basics on managing production, factories, trade and so forth, and teaches you how to fight in the war against Ethiopia. Paradox, however, has included an excellent tutorial, which allows you to play a guided opening as Italy in the 1936 scenario. Running a nation on the brink of all-encompassing conflict is, as you probably can guess, an arduous task. The game does an excellent job of making any nation playable- while the great powers do have more well developed national focus trees, the generic focus trees for the other countries are very powerful, allowing for you to take your country in any direction you wish. Without that option, I had to earn my way to the conflict. Still, I did find myself pining for a 1942 or 1944 start to get into the late war in a more historical way. In classic Paradox fashion, you can pick any nation in the world to play as, so, while there are only two scenarios, there are a huge number of ways to play. Hearts of Iron 4 has two scenarios- a 1936 start where, unless you’re Italy or Ethiopia, you start the game at peace, and a 1939 start where the world is on the brink of total war. Hearts of Iron 4, on the other hand, while still embracing a significant level of details, also balancing this with an excellent interface and a number of features that make running a global war not only more possible, but more fun. Hearts of Iron 3 (especially following its final expansion), in its pursuit of this goal, presented a game that was hugely detailed but also incredibly complicated, almost to the point where the game became unplayable. The Hearts of Iron series aspires to more, however, attempting to convey leadership of a nation in a huge war, while still allowing the player the freedom to command at a divisional scale in combat. Most present either a high level of abstraction or switch to an operational or tactical scale to present more detail (while sacrificing the bigger picture). Grand Strategy, Hearts of Iron 4, Paradox Development Studio, Paradox Interactive, Real Time Strategy, The Strategy Gamerĭetailed grand strategy games on World War II are few and far between.
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