This is the first half of the third part (I, II) of our long-delayed series looking at Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game, easily one of the most popular historical games on the market today and thus tremendously influential in both the popular history and gaming spaces.
Over the last two parts, we took a look at the military simulation that sits at the heart of Hearts of Iron, a division-level operational simulation of World War II, along with the doctrinal framework that contextualizes what is actually happening as divisions collide along the game’s front lines. While the doctrinal system struggles to really accurately represent the different ways that armies attempted to fight in the Second World War, the overall operational simulator is a remarkable achievement. Alas, the discussion is going to turn somewhat more critical from here as we move from the operational focus of the game – where the bulk of developer time and attention have gone – to the ‘everything else’ of the game, where simplifications and streamlining often go awry.
In this part, we’re going to move upwards to the strategic level, beginning with the question of politics, particularly domestic politics. Hearts of Iron IV has an understandably more simplified approach to politics than games like Victoria II or III or even Europa Universalis V which are substantially focused on questions of how changing conditions alter the political and economic balance of a polity. Simplified, however, does not mean absent: Hearts of Iron IV does have a ‘theory of history’ when it comes to the politics of the period.
Unfortunately – and I will not bury the lede here – Hearts of Iron IV‘s simplified politics serve to present an essentially authoritarian vision of politics in which the opinion of the people matters essentially not at all, where state power can easily and effortlessly shape outcomes and where authoritarian central direction is easy, frictionless and never produces unintended results and where democracy comes effectively only with drawbacks. It is a vision of politics that begs the question1 in favor of empire and autocracy, where the only way to achieve social, cultural or political change is to first have control of the state. Governments in Hearts of Iron do not fall, they cannot be overthrown, they can only decide to abolish themselves, so absolute is authoritarian state power.
It is thus not inaccurate to say that Hearts of Iron IV‘s political model, as a result of careless simplification is fascist, in that it assumes that all politics flows down from the state, dictated by the leader and merely accepted by the people who do not exist as individuals, but merely units of state power. I do not think that the developers set out to build a fascist model of politics (indeed, I know they didn’t), but alas, despite themselves, in an effort to get the player ‘to the action’ with as little friction as possible, they have done so.
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The Dutch still managed to lose Java, but control of this area let me steadily work with a modest army to take Siam out of the war, then reclaim Dutch Indonesia and Borneo. Meanwhile, mounting IJN losses meant that the USA was actually able to support the Philippines, so by January of 1942, the war in the Pacific had already decisively shifted away from Japan.
I made the decision to remain focused on Europe, because the AI United States would have no problem defeating Japan at this point, so I kept my fleet operating in Indonesia to keep that area secure while the IJN was steadily dismantled by the USN.
Politics
On the surface, Hearts of Iron IV appears to have the components of an interesting political simulation: each country has a governing ideology along with a pie-chart of what ideologies are popular with the populace, along with stability (representing how stable the government is) and war support (reflecting how committed the populace is to the war). The problem is two-fold: none of these mechanics are very developed and none of these mechanics interact meaningfully with each other.
The system, such as it is, begins with ideology and here we run into immediate problems in representing the actual political conditions inside of most countries in the period. There are just four ideologies: democratic, communist, fascist and non-aligned. While the game does have ‘sub-ideologies’ (for instance, ‘liberalism,’ ‘conservatism,’ ‘socialism’ and ‘populism’ for democracy) these have functionally no influence on gameplay – their sum effect is to determine if your ‘same ideology’ diplomatic opinion bonus is +20 or merely +10, both numbers which in actual gameplay are either indistinguishable from zero or indistinguishable from 100, depending on what you are trying to do.2 So in practice, there are just the four ideologies.
These ideologies do matter, because the governing ideology of a country determines what actions it can take, although in practice this is just an exciting set of disabilities applied to democracies. Democracies are heavily limited in the actions they can take, particularly not being able to declare war without meeting specific conditions, with requirements that ‘world tension’ (the amount of conflict in the game) reach certain levels before they can take actions. Democracies that guarantee the independent of other countries lower world tension, which in the game mechanically is bad for them, because democracies have a lot more things (like conscription and mobilization laws) gated behind world tension. Communist, non-aligned and fascist governments largely lack these limitations and thus have much greater freedom of action to mobilize earlier (which, as we’ll see in a later post, is simply better rather than being a truly strategic choice) and attack more freely.
The idea here is to model the challenge of bringing the United States and United Kingdom onto a war footing before the war began but in practice, mechanically, democracy is simply a weaker form of government in Hearts of Iron. It is striking that no effort is made to simulate the strengths that democratic governments displayed in this period, particularly in adaptability and economic mobilization. Historically, the United Kingdom, a fraction of the size of Hitler’s continental European empire after 1940, nevertheless outproduced it in key categories like aircraft.3
The game tracks the popularity of specific ideologies in a given country with a pie-chart, but the insufficiency of this model becomes fairly obvious fairly quickly. While each country often has a unique name for each ideology, representing actual political parties in the period, divisions within an ideology are not represented. So, for instance, the United States is represented as having 99% popular ‘Democratic’ ideology. The idea here is that in Hearts of Iron IV‘s really simplified politics, the Republican and Democratic parties of 1936 are indistinguishable – both ‘Democratic’ ideology parties – and so are combined (though this is still too high – Socialist third-party candidates generally got ~2-3% in the federal elections of this period). It also strikes me as wrong – the fact that Strom Thurmond leading a ‘State’s Rights’ party (a segregationist party that probably ought to be classified at least as non-aligned given its intent to restrict the franchise) would go on to win four states in 1948 (within the game’s timeframe!) suggests that there was a meaningful constituency for a less democratic United States even in the 1940s.
Other countries suffer the same ‘party compression.’ The game has no way to distinguish in the UK between the Tories and Labour, so it doesn’t: they’re merged into a Tory (Democracy Ideology) mega-party with an unshakeable lock on politics. Pre-war Germany’s situation in 1936 are likewise simplified: the Nazi party starts with 50% popular support, while there is a chunk of Democratic ideological support (marked as Zentrum, despite the fact that the party had dissolved itself under Nazi pressure in July of 1933), communist support (the KPD) and some non-aligned. The SPD/Sopade isn’t represented at all.
Meanwhile, there is the absolute mess of the ‘non-aligned’ ideology, which encompasses non-fascist despotism, traditional absolute monarchy, quasi-democratic oligarchies, colonial dependencies and even the fractured, military-dominated political structure of the Japanese Empire. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the ‘non-aligned’ category functions as effectively a ‘grab bag’ for every country that doesn’t fit into the first three categories. In practice, the game thus largely treats ‘non-aligned’ as thus an absence of ideology: there is no way to start a global ‘non-aligned’ movement the way that democracies, fascists and communists can all create (or start with) factions aimed at promoting their ideology.
The result is a political system that simply lacks the granularity to represent politics as they existed in many countries in the period, which as we’ll see, mostly doesn’t matter for the game because this system barely matters for political change compared to the much greater influence of the focus system and political advisors. The game does have mechanics for elections, but in most of the major democracies, with all of the pro-democracy parties fused, that doesn’t mean much.
Popular ideology can change over the course of the game, but this too is extremely simplified. In practice, most countries have access to advisors they can hire (at the cost of 150 political power) who will cause popular opinion to trend towards one ideology at a rate of 0.10% per day. For some countries, getting this advisor requires completing a few national focuses (see below) to get on the right track for an ideology switch. But I want to stress how big that rate is: at +0.1 per day (the standard rate for the ‘Communist Revolutionary, Fascist Demagogue, Democratic Reformer and Staunch Monarchist advisors) a country could go from having no support at all for a given kind of government to having enough support (50%) to transition to that entirely new kind of government with little to no issues at all in less than a year and a half.
You just have to hire the right one guy. Also, this requires a government to decide to hire an advisor whose entire purpose is to undermine the government, overthrow it and in many cases presumably murder every other member of the government, but we’ll come back to that.
A similar lack of consequence assails stability and war-support as mechanics. Both stats offer bonuses when above 50% and penalties below 50% and in theory low war support can feed back into low stability which can in theory feed back into creating a political crisis. In practice, this almost never happens. War support acts as a more-or-less fixed value (it isn’t meaningfully responsive to casualties) which can be raised through war propaganda (costing political power, see below), while stability is likewise generally a fairly static value. Generally, the internal politics of states in Hearts of Iron IV are extremely stable such that the player needs to actively intervene to force political crises (sometimes a tool to intentionally change governing ideology early).
Our United Kingdom campaign comes with several examples of this sort of a-historical stability. The game requires, for instance, a bespoke event to transition from Neville Chamberlain’s government to that of Winston Churchill because the political system is both not granular enough to model the Norway Debate and subsequent vote of confidence happening as a debate within a political ideology as a result of serious policy setbacks.
Likewise, somewhat famously, support in the Wehrmacht for the invasion of France in 1940 was tepid and a number of high ranking officers were on the verge of attempting a coup if the invasion of France had failed. Of course, historically it succeeded, cementing Hitler’s power through to the end of the war. But Hearts of Iron IV has no way to model the failure of Fall Gelb (the invasion of the Low Countries) as a political event which might imperil the Nazi regime. Instead, unless the player is actively and aggressively attempting to intervene in internal German politics in ahistorical ways, Germany remains fully committed to Hitler’s vision down to the end of the war.
Instead, the political system serves as an essentially minimal scaffolding necessary to produce what Hearts of Iron IV actually cares about: the operational simulation. This is perhaps most obvious in the choice of political advisors and military staff, representing essentially key figures in something like a cabinet and a general staff respectively. But while these advisors are named after historical figures (with portraits), they are for the most part just a set of standard bonuses the player is choosing between in preparation for the operational simulator. Any sense that these choices might be dictated by domestic politics is removed by the fact that these slots always (I am unaware of any exceptions) begin empty, so that assembling a collection of advisors – really a collection of advisor-themed bonuses – is a key expenditure of political power in getting ready for the war during the 1930s.
But apart from advisors whose only specific purpose is to promote a specific ideology (which you only choose if you intend to ideology switch to that ideology, there isn’t any need to ‘defend’ the popularity of your current governing ideology because of how static the political model is here), these ‘advisors’ do not interact with your domestic political situation at all.
This is, however, in stark contrast to the thing that does matter quite a lot.
On Focus
Part of the reason the political mechanics remain largely skeletal is that for the most part core player political decision-making doesn’t take place there: it takes place in the focus tree.
Every country in Hearts of Iron IV has a focus tree and nearly all of them are unique. This is a significant change from HoI4‘s structure on release, where only a handful of countries (the major powers) had unique focus trees, while every other country has a ‘default’ focus tree. However, years of updates and DLCs have added bespoke focus trees to nearly every country on the map, with the result that only a handful of small countries use that ‘default’ focus tree. Some countries, however, still have far more developed focus trees than others, which gives a good sense of where the developers expect most players to spend their time (unsurprisingly, major players like the USSR, Germany, Japan all have very expensive trees; the trees for the USA and the UK are more developed than for most minors but also very obviously not at the same level as those for the other major powers – an implication we’ll come back to when we discussing modding).
Each node on the focus tree (a ‘national focus’) represents a specific political decision meant to represent a choice to focus the government on a specific aim for a short period (generally 70 days). These are arranged in a series of ‘trees’ where earlier foci unlock the ability to choose later ones and where branches are frequently mutually exclusive, forcing the player to choose a political direction which may then last over several foci. Most foci are fairly direct, offering some sort of bonus (easier research in a field, some new factories, a small permanent bonus called a ‘national spirit’) once completed, but most countries have a part of their focus tree designed to allow them to switch governing ideology through a series of foci that empower a specific different ideology, and many countries also have foci that unlock casus bellorum enabling them to go to war where they might not otherwise be able to do so.4
So in practice, each country begins the game by selecting a focus of the few available at the top of tree. This triggers a timer (typically 70 days, but many shorter 35-day foci exist, particularly in recently updated trees) after which the focus is completed, the country gets the bonus and a new focus is selected, with a few new choices opened up in the tree by the completion of the first focus and so on.
Enacting a focus is not entirely free. The game attempts to simulate the ‘political capital’ that a government has through a political power currency, which most countries generate at a rate of 2 per day.5 This currency is used to hire new advisors and to change a country’s laws (most notably conscription and economic mobilization laws) and is usually in short supply, particularly in the early game. Enacting a focus costs 1 political power per day (representing the governments efforts to get the job done), so most foci cost 70 political power, which is about half of what most advisors or law changes cost.
That said, national foci are powerful enough that it is fairly rare that any player would want to ignore them for the political power cost (except, rarely, right before a war is about to start, where a player wants to stockpile political power to be able to rapidly shift to stronger mobilization and conscription laws). Instead, the tendency is to have a focus running continuously well into the mid-game, making the key decisions here what focuses to take and in what order.
The range of what national focuses can do is unsurprisingly vast, but there is a common structure, generally. Most countries have a branch of the tree devoted to developing industry, which offers bonus civilian and military factories, extra building slots and research bonuses for that sort of thing, alongside a branch that instead focuses on military development, often unlocking research bonuses for specific kinds of units and national spirits that offer country-specific bonuses to production or combat. For countries that historically had active air or naval arms, this part of the tree is often split into non-mutually exclusive branches between the services, forcing the player to prioritize what part of their military to focus on first.
Then there is generally a series of ‘political paths,’ which often encompass together both domestic and foreign policy. Typically at the top of these trees is the crucial decision to either remain the ideology the country starts as or to attempt to shift ideology, with various ideology shifts having a series of foci which often empower that ideology. Indeed, and this seems worth noting, in a lot of cases, these foci exert a substantially stronger ideological push on a country’s population than most other options the player has, either by unlocking specific ticking modifiers or by unlocking specific decisions (often culminating in a civil war in which the player can, by winning, force the ideology switch). Generally tucked into the political path are also a set of foreign policy choices, usually to include focuses that result in allying with countries of similar ideologies or – for more expansionist ideologies (which is to say not the democratic ones) – foci that offer war goals against various countries to enable military expansion.
The result of all of this is that the key big picture decisions are not made in the political system itself, but rather in the focus system. If the player wants to, say, take Britain non-aligned they do so not by really engaging deeply with the political system, but by selecting the non-aligned focus path, which actually has a focus that starts popular opinion moving non-aligned. This creates something of an oddity because under normal circumstances, the player is clearly positioned as the government, but a player who intends to ideology shift is plotting against their government. In essence, Hearts of Iron IV imagines that the way a county shifts ideologies is that the existing government opts to spend precious political capital undermining itself in order to prepare the war for a civil war it intends to lose.
You may notice that Germany’s focus tree is so vast that it requires a handy navigation aid in the lower left to allow the player to quickly jump to each branch, something not present for the much smaller focus trees for Britain, France, the USSR or the United States (Japan, China and oddly, the British Raj, also have extremely large focus trees with navigator panels). This might suggest something about where the Hearts of Iron team is spending its resources and what they understand about their playerbase.
We’ve seen this problem before, where Paradox titles struggle to decide if the player plays as a government or as the disembodied ‘spirit’ of a state, but of course the idea that nations have spirits at all is a loaded, contested one, bound up with nationalist notions of ‘national destiny.’ Notably, however, the player is very clearly not an expression of the actual public will: at no point is the player actually constrained to follow the popular ideology: it is only the ruling ideology that constrains them. The people and their ideology are, in Hearts of Iron IV for the most part just clay, eager and ready to be molded by the player’s simple decision to click this button and not that one.
And to be clear I think it isn’t too hard to understand why the game has been designed this way: if the core of the Hearts of Iron experience is the operational simulation, then everything else is simply a frame to get the player to that simulation. But of course for the most popular grand strategy game – which is the genre label Paradox prefers for its games – that is a troubling framework because it greatly simplifies the strategic and political layer.
Meme Politics
To explain how, I am going to borrow a term from Samantha Hancox-Li, who called Hearts of Iron IV‘s approach meme politics. Hancox-Li defines the idea of ‘meme politics’ as consisting of three conjoined political assumptions:
- Every policy does exactly what it intends
- Politics is straight forward and information is perfect
- Policy does not face meaningful resistance
And I think that is a relatively fair description of the focus tree system’s approach to politics. Each focus declares, right on the tin, exactly what it will do and these choices never go awry – even the foci that can cause a civil war will have that clearly declared in their descriptions in advance. I find this particularly striking when it comes to industrial policy: just about every country has an industrial policy section of the focus tree, where in most cases they are merely selecting the “I would like more civilian and/or military factories 35 or 70 days from now” focus and letting it run.
But of course in practice in the real world, industrial policy is remarkably difficult and very frequently goes wrong: government interventions often lead to reduplicated efforts, sectors bloated beyond requirements, or they simply fail. Even a casual read of something like Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) reveals how much of a confused muddle Nazi industrial policy was. Allied armaments and economic efforts fared better, but were still often chaotic and impromptu at the time – initial US estimates of the military production possible in 1942, for instance, were wildly over-optimistic – akin to a situation where the ‘build military factory’ focus says it will add ten military factories but only adds five (or none!). But that simply cannot happen in Hearts of Iron IV.
Likewise, there is rarely much meaningful pushback for these focuses: they do what they say they do and only very few carry the possibility of blowback (which is – again, perfect information – clearly marked). An industrial plan never unexpectedly runs up against resistance from industrialists or workers or farmers or foreign financial interests. If you are playing as Communist China, you just trigger the ‘Agricultural Reform’ focus and ‘The Great Production Movement’ which just directly give you bonuses to construction speed and production because no industrial modernization movement led by Mao Zedong ever went wrong due to incomplete information, faulty implementation or any problem of unfounded ideological assumptions.
This lack of blowback is, of course, most obvious in the domestic political branches of the trees. While in many cases switching governing ideology does require a civil war or comes with penalties to stability, in practice making the decision for the government to abolish itself is as simple as clicking on the focus button, at which point the whole machinery of government – represented by the political power you are spending – gets to work on the job of becoming a different kind of government and unless that effort triggers an explicit civil war, no one tries to stop you.
Likewise, so long as you do not trigger one of those ideology-shifting trees, government control is extremely stable. In practice, throughout the war, leaders were abundantly aware that their power might be fragile – that battlefield setbacks or other problems might compromise their ability to lead. Not so in Hearts of Iron IV: governments are only fragile when they choose to be.
It is equally striking that in a game simulating an era of mass politics, the people matter very little to this system. As noted above, radically changing the population’s political beliefs in HoI4 is not hard – it is, in fact, very easy: it costs 150 political power to hire the single advisor who on their own will change a majority of the minds in the country in less than two years. 150 political power is, again, just about twice the cost of a single national focus or the same cost as moving a country’s conscription or mobilization law by a single step. This is a model of politics where once a political faction gets into government, mass-converting the entire populace and country to their ideology is presented as easy, a process of simply hitting the right button.
That said, by May, 1942 I had assembled a mobile force of 10 armored divisions and 10 supporting motorized divisions to attempt to ‘punch outwards’ and launched that offensive in June. The initial goal was to push out eastward from Utrecht and then use the relatively flat ground to run to the Weser before turning north to trap any Germany forces left in the northern Netherlands.
Imperialism by Focus
When I was planning this series, I knew I’d want an example of just how absurd the outcomes that the focus tree can almost effortlessly give you are. Since we’re doing a United Kingdom run in the background, I thought I would use the Imperial Federation decision-chain as an example.
Now the concept of something like an Imperial Federation is not entirely a-historic – like many of these ‘alternate history’ paths, it is based on an idea that was talked about in the period – although as equally frequent the case, an idea that never got very far. From 1887 to 1937, the British Empire held somewhat regular ‘Imperial Conferences,’ where representatives of the constituent elements of the British Empire, including the Dominions, would meet. One of the ideas floated in the late 1880s and very early in the 1900s was the idea of creating a federal superstate encompassing the United Kingdom and the Dominions, an Imperial Federation; the idea never had tremendous support and was basically dead by 1926. But the United Kingdom focus tree lets you revive the concept and – solely as the United Kingdom, by pure force of political will (by which we mean pressing the button) force it through.
The entire sequence requires 12 national focuses, involving investments (fairly modest in scope and which come at no cost except the 70 day delay and political power cost of a focus) in the industry of India and the Dominions and then holding an Imperial Conference.
That then fires an event, the ‘Imperial Conference,’ at which the player can propose various common economic, military and political policies, at which point they can then propose an Imperial Federation. If all of the Dominions (potentially and the British Raj) accept, all of them get massive negative ticking autonomy, causing them to drift inexorably deeper under British control until the final Imperial Federation focus becomes available, annexing Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the British Raj into a single mega-state, the Commonwealth of Nations, which contrary to its name does not in any way function as a federal state, but rather as a single, unitary state of enormous size.6
Now it is possible for the Dominions to refuse – as they absolutely would have if this had been proposed in this period – but by raising their diplomatic opinion to +100, the player can guarantee a 100% acceptance rate. And – more meme politics – raising diplomatic opinion to 100 is simply a matter of clicking the ‘improve relations’ button, which will cost 10 political power to start (so almost nothing) and a ticking cost of 0.2 per day7 will raise relations to +100 in just a couple of months. Want to get the Canadians to like you so much they’d give up self-government for you? Just hit the button.
The result is that in practice it takes a player-run United Kingdom just about two years to achieve something that in practice in the 1930s and 1940s was probably impossible at any level of effort. The popular consciousness of entire countries is effortlessly molded, are a perfectly linear rate of x% per day, into whatever form is required.
Notably, the game also does not ask the player to think at all about the outcome of this decision, it just works. And here I think a brief thought experiment is useful: what would an Imperial Federation c. 1940 entail? Decisions would have to be made about how the Dominions would be represented in a ‘super-parliament’ in London: by population? By white population (think hard about South Africa’s situation before answering)? And what about the Raj? If India was represented by population, it would instantly hold 70% or more of the seats. Now it is hard to see how India and Pakistan – with the Indian independence movement already very well advanced (the Non-cooperation Movement started in 1919!) – would ever agree to any such federation but surely they would not agree to any federation where they had an artificially reduced percentage of the vote. But it is equally impossible to imagine the United Kingdom or the Dominions agreeing to a super-federation that would have been, in practice, the Empire of New Delhi given the balance of votes in a pure by-population-system.
In short, even if India isn’t included, there are just very obvious insurmountable political hurdles here both for actually forming the federation and also that such a federation would immediately face after the war. Including India merely compounds those problems.
Hearts of Iron IV asks the player to consider exactly none of these issues. You simply march linearly down the focus tree, spending political power when necessary, remember to use ‘improve relations’ two to three months before firing the Imperial Conference decision and there you go. The focus to accomplish a probably impossible feat does exactly what it says on the tin, with no pushback and perfect information about the results and the effort requires the whole way through. The problems all, presumably, work themselves out off-screen: a good example of Hearts of Iron IV‘s ‘meme politics’ structure, but hardly a unique one – basically all political questions in HoI4 are resolved this way.
And the wild part is, the Imperial Federation is one of the most complex of such sequences, since it requires a whole event chain and a substantial delay between getting everyone to agree and having the federation actually happen (though mechanically, once everyone agrees, no one can really stop the federation from happening – the downward ticking autonomy is more than anyone is likely to be able to counteract). You hit the right button, wait for the delay and the thing the button says it does happens and the opinions or resistance of the hundreds of millions of people who are involved doesn’t matter a damn.
On the southern end of the pocket, I make it to Dortmund but not deeper into the Rhineland as the terrain there is difficult and the attack runs out of steam before I can secure all of the urban centers. That’s fine – this rush is plenty for now.
The Effect
This is obviously an extremely simplistic model of politics. The contrast with the still-quite-simplified but far more complex political simulation in Victoria II or III or Europa Universalis V or Crusader Kings III is remarkable. As Hancox-Li notes, this is a vision of politics which seems to have crept out of gaming spaces into the real world (sometimes more or less explicitly invoked) – an assumption that major changes in society are not difficult or fraught or complex or sometimes backfire, but merely require finding the right button, the right national focus, which is neatly labeled “Do The Thing” on the tin, and pressing it forcefully enough.
And it isn’t hard to see, as a question of development time and focus, how we got here: this is a game about fighting World War II, fundamentally focused on its operational simulation. Everything else – diplomacy, politics, espionage, industrial policy8 – is merely a delivery mechanism, the unadorned, simple frame in which to present the operational painting. And so choices can be simplified down to the basics, made predictable and streamlined so they do not distract the player too much from the core of the game, which is smashing divisions into other divisions. Equally, most of the friction here is removed to facilitate players who want to change up the exact layout of the board where they are smashing their Army Men together.
And to be clear, I have nothing against a pure operational simulation or war games in general. But this is, notionally, supposed to be a grand strategy game. Grand strategy is, definitionally, the coordination of political, diplomatic, economic and military means to achieve strategic ends. If two (three, really, as we’ll see) of those means are radically simplified in this way, are we really doing grand strategy? And if we’re not – why include the strategic simulation at all? Why not structure the game as a series of operations?
But there is, I think a deeper problem here (one we’ll see recur over the next few posts), the unintended implications of these gameplay simplifications. And I’ll be blunt: Hearts of Iron IV presents an authoritarian model of politics. It presents a world in which the authoritarians (both fascists and the communists) are fundamentally right about the nature of politics – that individuals do not matter. All that matters is the state, embodied in the player.
The people in Hearts of Iron IV do not yearn for freedom, nor do they really even have their own ideologies at all. All it takes is hiring the right propagandist and selecting the right focus tree button – decisions whose cost and time investment are trivial compared to the military aspects of the game – and any leader can bend any population into believing anything. In HoI4, the authoritarian, central direction of all of society – culture and economy – is not merely possible, but it is desirable, it is better mechanically, as players will find that authoritarian government forms allow them to adopt better (for military activity, the only thing the game considers) laws earlier, to be more assertive strategically, all while suffering no penalties at all from the effort to centrally direct an entire society. Playing as a democracy in Hearts of Iron IV is essentially a ‘roleplay’ choice to accept limited mechanics for no real benefit.
This stands, of course, in rather direct and remarkable opposition to the actual war in which many of the advantages of democratic forms of government were on display, particularly in the organization and employment of economic resources. The Soviet economic mobilization during the war (conducted in the context of extreme military pressure and lost territory) was undeniably impressive, a feat of will and sacrifice, yet in 1942 and 1943, the United Kingdom – not the British Empire, just the United Kingdom – was outproducing the USSR in total GDP despite having a tiny fraction of the landmass and around a third of the population.9
If anything, the advantages that open, democratic societies could bring to war was even more obvious when it came to research and technological development. The consistency with which the United States and the United Kingdom deployed new technologies first and with greater effectiveness is staggering: radar, sonar (=ASDIC), proximity fuses, industrial technology, superior cryptography, advanced gunsights and stabilizers, new explosives (like Torpex) and of course nuclear weapons. And whereas most powers in the war were forced to specialize on particular classes of military equipment (e.g. Japanese tank designs were outdated, the USSR’s navy was very limited, Germany lacked effective heavy bombers, etc.) the United States and United Kingdom did all of that while also designing competitive equipment models in effectively every category. It is a staggering triumph of intellectual-industrial might that goes almost entirely unsimulated in Hearts of Iron.10
Likewise, the strategic downsides of autocracy – particularly the tendency of autocratic leaders to order foolish, wasteful military actions out of arrogance, ignorance and pride – were abundantly on display in the Second World War for both the Axis and the USSR, but this too is unrepresented in the game.
Fundamentally, Hearts of Iron IV has a political model where all that is required to change the kind of society one has is to seize power and then order the Gleichschaltung11 from above. That is a fundamentally authoritarian view of power and also a fundamentally contested view: part of what the war was about was, on some level, if this view of politics was sustainable, if polities organized on this basis could compete with the liberal democracies and by and large the verdict of the battlefield12 was no, they could not. Hearts of Iron IV grants the question, a priori, to the authoritarians, as an act of uncritical game design: authoritarian politics – fascist politics – work in HoI4 in exactly the way that the fascists of the 1930s and 1940s imagined they did.
In an effort to streamline away any political friction and get straight to the ‘fun stuff’ of war, Hearts of Iron IV adopts a fundamentally authoritarian vision of politics, uncritically and without caveats.
And the resulting vision is simply inaccurate. To take our Imperial Federation example above, in the real world the rising tide of decolonization could not simply be wished away – not even in the 1930s – by hiring the right advisor or pressing the right button. Popular opinion was not, in fact, easily and effortlessly molded by governments, but in fact would spend the 20th century for the most part bending governments rather than being bent by them. World War II was a war of mass politics in which the politics of the masses mattered a great deal and the decision by HoI4 to simplify that away into an exercise of pure state power leaves the player with quite a misleading assumption of how the politics of the 1930s came to be the way they were.
One understands the desire to simplify the mechanics that frame the core experience of a game, but it is necessary to be very careful in how those elements are simplified so that the simplification doesn’t end up doing violence to the underlying history.
Unfortunately, domestic politics is hardly the only historical concern of the 1930s and 1940s that Hearts of Iron IV airbrushes away – next week we’ll turn to the questions of occupation, bombing and war crimes. It isn’t going to get better.
- in the correct meaning of the phrase as granting the conclusion of a debate from the beginning.
- In particular, relations have relatively little impact on gameplay, except for trade (where positive relations are generally sufficient) and certain events (where the requirement is often relations at very high levels, where small bonuses do not mean much against the potential +100 ‘improve relations’ action. Diplomatic relations are simply not an important mechanic in most runs.
- Indeed, while Britain outproduced Germany in planes and wildly so in ships, it came quite close to matching German armored vehicle production tank for tank, while producing substantially more artillery and support vehicles than Germany did. For an overview of war production, see the relevant chapters in R. Overy, Why the Allies Won (1997) which covers the figures quite well. We’ll come back to this topic later in this series.
- The plural of casus belli is casus bellorum; casus (note: not causa, not ’cause’ for war, but ‘occasion’ (casus) for war) is Fourth Declension and so its plural is also casus, while belli needs a genitive plural, bellorum, ‘occasions (plural) for wars (plural).’
- Modified by difficulty. One of the major ways the harder difficulties are made harder is by reducing political power gain by a percentage, thus ‘starving’ a player for political power in the early game.
- The real challenge with taking this route is balancing the political power demands of preparing for war with the costs of this route and keeping the autonomy of South Africa and India carefully under control as you do so. That said, as you can see in the screenshots, once the player sets out to do this, achieving it is a basically mechanical process. Notably it is also entirely independent of how the war itself is going so long as Germany isn’t invading the United Kingdom itself: the Dominions will happily jump on a sinking ship as surely as a United Kingdom that has made itself the undisputed imperial master of Europe.
- 0.4 for India because it is non-aligned.
- Really also naval warfare.
- And you may ask, “But the USSR made so many tanks and so much artillery! Indeed it did, but of course the United Kingdom was also churning out aircraft (more of these on its own than the USSR, I may note) and ships in enormous quantity, as well as fielding a fully motorized army that demanded a lot more support vehicles than the USSR. The point here is not that the Soviet mobilization was botched – I don’t think one can argue it was, given the difficult conditions the USSR faced post-1941 – but that the British mobilization approach clearly worked. It certainly worked better than that of Germany or Italy or Japan and arguably better than that of the Soviet Union. And all that is without touching the economic mobilization juggernaut that was the United States.
- Indeed, the reverse is true: split between needing to keep up in air, land and naval technology, the United Kingdom generally has to fall behind somewhere. In the run above, the ‘somewhere’ was naval technology, where I researched basically no new hull designs, merely iterating on existing patterns because the pre-war UK fleet was mostly ‘good enough.’
- Literally ‘coordination,’ the Nazi term for compelling all institutions to submit to Nazi party totalitarian control, with the idea that the entire society – economy, culture, media, all of it – would be effectively Nazi-fied.
- I am simplifying, of course, because the question extends out into the Cold War, albeit delivering the same eventual verdict.
Perfect information is a thorny topic in the Paradox community: all their 4X games have this aspect for obvious accessibility reasons; obfuctation mods exist, but they are used only by a fraction of experienced players looking for more challenge.
Perfect execution is instead a purely EoI choice because the whole game can be resumed by “Pick your favourite alternate timeline”: adding success rates to each focus (or any other decision to include friction or randomness) would ruin the core gameplay loop.
I like how the first sentence has the numbers 1 through 4 in it, in one way or another (even without counting the links to previous posts) 😛
“This is the *first* half of the *third* part (I, II) of our long-delayed series looking at Hearts of Iron *IV*, Paradox Interactive’s World War *II* grand strategy game”
Maybe our host should have just uninstalled ‘Hearts of Iron IV’ inside the first half dozen hours, once it became apparent to him that it was little more than a blatant propaganda vehicle for fascist ideology?
Unless he was under some kind of contractual compulsion to continue to interact with it?
You know how a joke loses its cute and funny factor after one diseccts it and learns the wordplay, hidden mechanics and rectoric device that makes it work?
Your Name.
Uhhhh, just in case you saw it “in the wild” and don’t know how it became a code word;
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cute+and+funny
Uh, no, it is a fun operations-level video game whose non-facist devs have added a political system that inadvertently endorses facism.
And no, he has no contract with Paradox beyond that they invite him to their convention sometimes and once gave him free stuff. He’s not actually a game reviewer as such and probably isn’t selling copies to anyone who isn’t already a customer.
You’d rather someone comment on the game who *doesn’t* play and enjoy it? Somehow I doubt it. No one commenting on this would be acceptable.
If you truly believe no one is allowed to comment on the politics of a game just say that. You’d look like a mouth breathing idiot, so it’d be a marked improvement.
From this week’s dissection of politics, and the ominous hints about war-crimes in the next article due in this series, I’m left with an impression that our host does not enjoy this product however.
Undercover investigative journalism, maybe? I’m not sure that people engaged in that usually enjoy what they’re looking into, but nevertheless may feel obligation to check it over very thoroughly before passing comment.
Ah, and that would make me taken in by the acerbic mannered history professor disguise… 😀 :thumbsup:
….No I’m fairly sure he enjoys the game on the whole, he’s pretty up with the way the meta’s moved in it. One rarely is that for games they hate. It’s more that he disagrees with the way specific aspects are handled. He also pretty pointedly avoids calling it ‘fascist propaganda’, because, well, propaganda is a matter of intent. It’s an emergent outcome of specific design priorities that leads to a bad outcome here. But even if he hated it, he’s trying to understand a thing that’s popular. You don’t just clock out after an unsavory conclusion when that’s your goal.
‘…You don’t just clock out after an unsavory conclusion when that’s your goal…’
Which is the direction I’m moving in along with the realisation that I missed a wide field of possibilities with my initial comment.
Dang it. It doesn’t let me like your comment, because I don’t have an account.
Well consider +1 like.
He likes playing the game but think it teaches bad political theory. This isn’t complicated or secret and lots of people enjoy things they think have bad messages, intentional or otherwise.
I love reading Warhammer 40k even though too many people take a pro-fascist message away from it, although I will give it credit for the narrators basically turning to the reader and saying “Fascism is bad and makes the problems it claims to address much worse than they have to be even if the problems are real”.
I will never understand this line of reasoning. I see it all the time in discussions of gaming and books. The typical format in gaming is an article saying “10 Games from the 90s that are Unplayable!” where the article lists one, maybe two things that aren’t considered optimal today and declare that since the game has a flaw it’s totally worthless. In books it’s usually “This book doesn’t check this specific box in my ideology so is completely worthless.” I’ve seen it from every ideology, doesn’t really matter which one (zealots are a problem regardless of what they are zealous about).
My takes is the opposite. Bret is taking the game seriously. He’s considering it and looking at it beyond the surface level. Are there flaws? Sure, absolutely. A historian playing a game about history is going to find flaws, it’s sort of inherent to the experience. But part of maturity is understanding that just because something is flawed, doesn’t mean it’s worthless. If you only allow yourself to enjoy perfect things you’ll never enjoy anything.
It also must be said that sometimes discussing the flaws is just as fun as the game. The Elder Scrolls games are a good example of this. They are fantastic games, but no one pretends they aren’t buggy. Skyrim’s horses and Morrowind’s alchemy and enchantment have become memes beyond the games’ communities.
I think of it this way: Playing a game (or reading a book or listening to a song) in a shallow way is akin to a one-night stand. Sometimes that’s what you’re after, and if everyone’s on the same page it can be a very positive experience. Thinking about a game–actually exploring the implications of the lore and the mechanics–is more like a relationship. You interact with the game long after you put down the controller. Why would someone maintain a relationship with an artwork they dislike?
If you allow the continuation of the metaphor, Bret’s doing what Shakespeare did in one of his sonnets–my love isn’t a perfect beauty, and I love her as she is.
I would ask you to consider that critical thinking and critical dissection of a work of art (or media in general) is not the same as a review. You can love a work of art and still know its flaws. The idea that having a critical look at a thing and finding something to talk about immediately means hating the thing is frankly an anti-intellectual brainbug.
I have a feeling that the political system is hobbled by 2 issues. The first being that the obvious advantages of a near omniscient UI which flawlessly co-ordinated millions of soldiers means that actually simulating ‘if given the near-god-like ability to do that, could the player actually compete with the strategies of historical generals who occasionally got stuck communicating their orders via boy-scout runner’. The problem being that the map itself gives you a visible abstracted quasi-hive-mind that would probably have led you to be able to pull off all the feats of ahistorical strategic brilliance in the operational theater. Unfortunately, we’ve yet to come up with a cool graphic that would make you able to be as good at US politics as FDR, and the second point is ‘We expect a wide audience of American gamers who will likely play as the US first time through, and we need them not to get kicked out of office half way through the war’. This is especially bad because America was actually holding elections the entire time, and if you give a few years run up you’d probably have a situation where most players don’t get FDR’s unprecedented and since-unmatched run of American political stability.
Britain is slightly easier, given it suspended elections during the wartime coalition, so political maneuvering got a bit less important than actually winning the war for a bit (in fact, the only major political change was because Chamberlain was clearly losing it). This is further evidenced by the fact that Churchill so comprehensively outmaneuvered himself with probably-essential parts of his successful war-time policy being directly opposed to his peace-time ones. So he possibly was nearest historical example the player who was spending political capital to get his government to undermine his government (obviously the in-game ones are more severe than the war economy’s shifts to the left leading the conservatives to take a drubbing in the first-post war election).
Victoria 3 handles this by having you maintain control even if the rulership loses or even escalates to a civil war, either swapping to whichever side is in charge or whomever you pick in a split.
You’re still bound by what your people want and can do, and in current builds your control is always deeply limited. However you can still exercise something approaching a hybrid executive and legislative power, with some ability to do more esoteric things like “invite” agitators if you want to manipulate your politics, and in fact this power is vital to your economic and military success. A nation which has liberal citizenship and religious policies has more even social wage distribution, which in turn means that its got a more stable and robust tax base and civilian economy, while also letting you tax and employ more of your minority population. Plus you have much more manpower to marshall. Your economy and military are just better, although you do incur bureaucratic and government expenses to support these citizens.
Hoi4: is similar in this regard, except your people don’t matter. Elections are yours to decide or act as a random event giving mild modifiers. Your political system is likewise unimportant. A fascist Italy forming the roman empire has more core states and thus more manpower and industrial capacity than a democratic Italy which occupies the same region. The system is fundementally unequipped to handle any political reality.
I personally think this mostly arises from the time frame. Victoria 3 is nearly ten times longer than hoi4. But there’s player demand for more interwar politics, with all the oddball focus trees being examples of this. A lot of the achronistic and unrealistic focuses were real possibilities…in 1920.
After digesting the comments, I’ve come to the conclusion that Bret did kind of lean too far out of the window here. There was not really a need to open the can of worms that is “Do liberal democratic countries clearly perform better in modern warfare?” to make the points he’s making.
The Focus Tree is an issue even with this set aside. From the perspective of the “Teaching Paradox” canon, it’s clearly not just teaching anything, but teaching the completely wrong thing, which is “meme politics”. (I think Samantha’s take on it is somewhat sharper than Bret’s, but both are valid)
And from a gameplay perspective, it’s honestly also going against the design of Paradox’s Grand Strategy games, which is that all actors basically get the same rules by which to make their choices (Side note: Yes, there can be meta-rules constraining choices like Religion in CK3 – not relevant to the argument here). But the Focus Tree gives individual countries ways of enforcing outcomes outside of the “normal” rules of the game that everyone else without that focus has to abide by. That is not a good design choice for what is technically a multiplayer game. The issue I suspect (although I lack the data) is exacerbated by the centrality of the Focus Tree on the gameplay. I suspect way more wars in a HoI match are declared as a result of a Focus choice than via the non-focus methods of declaring war.
I wouldn’t say the concept is a gameplay problem; I loved the mission trees in Imperator. Now, those were generally objective based instead of letting a timer run where when Rome secured an area designated by the objective tree they got to designate a location to get Roman pops settled and some additional bonuses as a colony or Athens had to secure and build up Attica to restore their glory days with a special upgraded Republic gov type. But those were sparser and intended to take focused work to complete a selected tree probably over decades rather than clicking a button every 70 days. Also, anything that forced another country to do anything I’m pretty sure gave human players of that country a veto even if the AI always accepted.
And the alt history options didn’t feel like memes to me, like Carthage having a tree to invade Italy and reduce Rome to a vassal or obliterate it or Alexander’s successors or a resurgent Greece being able to unlock a huge and very difficult tree to be acknowledged as the true heir to Alexander by controlling most of his empire.
Alas, the unmodded game has a fairly short list of nations with even one custom mission tree but there’s a fallback pair of auto-generated trees for either warfare or upgrading a province.
My big criticism of Imperator’s trees is that they will sometimes mandate either holding territory directly when it should be possible to have a vassal hold it or releasing held territory as a vassal in a game where vassals kind of suck. So often I release a vassal to satisfy the objective and immediately set about folding it back in.
“And from a gameplay perspective, it’s honestly also going against the design of Paradox’s Grand Strategy games, which is that all actors basically get the same rules by which to make their choices […] But the Focus Tree gives individual countries ways of enforcing outcomes outside of the “normal” rules of the game that everyone else without that focus has to abide by. ”
pretty much in every paradox game individual countries have unique decisions/events that enforce outcomes outside of the “normal” rules of the game that everyone else without that decision has to abide by. Unique decisions/events/focuses/missions are pretty much the established method for delivering historical flavor, otherwise each game becomes a sandbox where the only difference and reference to history is the starting position. Now this is a controversial topic and there is a vocal minority of PDX players who want to play in a sandbox but I wager the vast majority play PDX games for their history content which in HoI4 is delivered in the form of focus trees.
To refine my critique:
Firstly, I think there’s a qualitative difference between the Focus Tree approach of HoI IV and the Missions/Decisions of other games. The latter make a more heavy use of conditions which have to be fulfilled using the general simulation rules of the game, while the former are based on primarily a timer that gives you an outcome bypassing the normal rules without requiring much in terms of setup.
Secondly, there is a difference in degree in the amount of special rules introduced by the Focus Tree. In a CK III or Victoria III game, you can explain the majority of what happens through the lens of the normal game systems – wars happen because the instigating player fulfilled their casus belli conditions, rebellions happen because the unhappiness rose over a threshold, etc. While in HoI IV, the impression I get is that the majority of non-combat game state changes happens because of a Focus Tree decision. Why did Germany attack Poland? Focus Tree. Why is there a civil war? Focus Tree. Why does this country have 10 more factories? Focus Tree. The ordinary simulation systems that could achieve the same outcome take a back seat to the individualized rules of the Focus Tree.
From what I understand there is a baseline simulation in HoI4 but it doesn’t let you do dramatic things like switching teams in most cases.
As I mentioned Imperator has a Mission system that can let you make major changes outside normal gameplay, like Macedon can create the Corinthian League to merge every vassal in Greece into a new tag and hand over all Macedon’s territory in Greece and there is no way to do this in normal gameplay I know of, or Thrace can take over Macedon and say “Look at me, I’m the Macedon now”. And it’s formatted like HoI4 focus trees (screen looks very nearly identical) except you have to pick a mission tree from a list of ones you meet the conditions to do and then you are stuck with it until you finish or pay a cost to abandon it and pick another from the pool. However, you are correct that you have to use the regular mechanics to meet the conditions for most of them, although there’s some where you get a free CB to take the territories needed for the next and such.
Personally I think Imperator’s system is great for handling events that happened historically but were really unlikely or were something that people wanted to do but never happened, as while I enjoy using systems to make unlikely things happen it’s hard to balance them so the outcome remains unlikely to occur in play for countries that didn’t do it historically while happening often for ones that did. My main complaint is that since they’re handcrafted per nation most nations don’t have any and the complexity of the missions for the ones that do varies a lot and you have to buy DLC to get many of the ones that exist. I am not sure that could be resolved practically.
I would say that focus trees upend the rest of the simulation in a way that mission trees, nation-specific advances/decisions, and the like generally don’t. Taking EU4’s mission trees as an example, they rarely _themselves_ encourage you to do the mildly obscene things the playerbase does; they mostly reward you for having succeeded at tasks you already put a premium on, rather than (inherently) telling you to switch government types. I do like the idea behind the focus trees, mind, and I don’t even think upending the simulation is necessarily a bad thing, but there’s a reason why they’re where the alt-history goes, and almost everyone has them.
As another approach, if we put the question “Is the Focus Tree good gameplay” aside (which I’ll grant is something reasonable minds can disagree on), the centrality of the Focus Tree to the gameplay ends up hamstringing the value of the game from a “Teaching Paradox” perspective in more than just the meme politics angle.
Because it presents social and political developments as fundamentally individualized. If every country is given a “theory” of how they might become fascist in the form of a Focus Tree path ending in fascism, then there’s no general theory of how countries might end up going fascist, there’s a whole lot of different theories and to pull anything out of it we’d have to do a comparative analysis of each individual Focus Tree to suss out general themes. This approach of “This is the specific path how we, the developers, might think this individual country might end up sliding into fascism” stands in stark contrast to the Victoria series, which was perfectly willing to post a set of general rules that can result in the rise of a fascist movement and government, so that it can bake that possibility into its simulation.
And once we’re down to having to analyze individual focus trees to figure out the general “rules” the game imagines for political developments, we of course have to contend with how those individual foci end up ignoring other aspects of sociology and politics. Which means the general rules, even if derivable, would be worthless, because they’d be based on a broken foundation – each individual focus is basically wild speculation that ignores some parts of reality, so the totality can’t claim not to have the same flaws.
I think it is ill-advised to label the political lens of the game as ‘fascist.’ As Bret notes, the game gives both Communist and fascist governments an advantage in not answering to public opinion, which, despite Bret also saying the democracies don’t heed public opinion, is basically what World Tension is. Since fascism is anti-Communist it almost definitionally isn’t giving that system an advantage over other kinds of authoritarian systems.
But even labelling it an ‘authoritarian’ lens would be misleading. I think it is clear that there is no ideological basis in the way the game is designed, nor does it impart any particular ideology on the player. There is no implication that authoritarian states are better to live in than democracies in the game itself, indeed I think almost everyone who plays an authoritarian state knows they are ‘the bad guys’ and doing bad things. It is extremely unlikely that anyone has become more politically authoritarian due to playing HoI4.
The game is just designed that way because it’s a game, and the simplicity of the politics aids its goal of being a thematic toy. Almost all strategy games include the same artifice of frictionless, total control as the ‘spirit’ of the state. If I order a building created in Total War, I also unrealistically see its precise effects, costs, and build times; if I order a unit to suicidally charge into battle, it instantly obeys, at least until its morale bar empties. The population is also totally unsimulated aside from a usually-ignorable ‘public order’ rating. By Bret’s argument, Total War and almost every strategy game is ‘fascist.’
I wish we would use the ‘f’ word less and just accept that entertainment is entertainment. Most people aren’t being ideologically swayed by it because they have the wisdom to compartmentalise it as just that, and they also have a basic level of compassion and reason which makes then human beings, not passive absorbers of ideology. There is a slight smell of moral panic here: the modern ritual of publically condemning art or entertainment as ‘fascist’ because it fulfilled its function as art or entertainment, not as right-on moral lecture, is ugly, alarming, and authoritarian in itself.
And he would be correct. They are all games about logistics and combat operations between groups where the player (and their AI controllers) wield ~absolute authoritarian power, with occasionally a small veneer of a stability/public order/pop unhappiness to provide more internal systems for players to manage (that they have absolute power over responding to).
Generally, that’s probably fine. When you sit down over a chess board, you’re there to play a game of chess, not consider the ethics of a conflict between two kings that sacrifice ~90% of their armies.
HOI4 puts a *lot* of historical political flavour on top of the wargame aspect of it, because it tries to provide an engine for ahistorical/off-rails games. And the more it does so, the more it does raise these questions.
I would argue that HoI is in a distinct position because it makes a claim to actually representing domestic politics in any detail while Total War is pretty clearly just here for the clash of armies and usually only goes into domestic politics enough to control what kind of armies you can recruit. Implicitly in the historical Total Wars there’s a lot of stuff being done independently by your governors based on trait descriptions and it can be assumed domestic politics are going on behind the scenes.
And even in Warhammer I certainly do not feel like I have total control over the Empire when I start up as Karl Franz, that’s just represented by my squabbling Elector-counts being onmap factions. Likewise Bretonnia has many independent dukes plus a peasant crusade off south. And as Cathay or High Elves explicitly the top boss isn’t even on the map and sometimes hands down orders.
“By Bret’s argument, Total War and almost every strategy game is ‘fascist.’”
You’ll have to pardon me, but this is a ridiculous, absurd claim to make in the fifth Teaching Paradox series, which has thus covered four other grand strategy games I evidently did not think adopted an authoritarian or fascist worldview.
I don’t even necessarily think the Total War games necessarily do either. Empire: Total War lets the people push back to a significant degree and republics and constitutional monarchies have their own unique advantages.
Your Medieval and Rome Total War kind of titles exist in historical thought-spaces dominated by traditional, customary forms of monarchy with all of the implied limits those create in terms of what the player can do. Those games may be state-centric, but they are not authoritarian in a modern sense either.
I think you might want to consider that – since you think my argument requires nearly all strategy games to be fascist – the fact that I quite evidently do not think so means that you have not fully understood the argument being made here and the specificity it has to *this* game and its systems.
The difference is clearly that the other games most people mention in this thread deliberately have minimal, nonexistent, or purely cosmetic political mechanics, and so can be accepted as “the focus is on generalship”. An extreme example being that Chess has no parliament, and that’s fine because its just not about that. But because HoI4 tries to have an engageable political layer that is vaguely shaped like real politics, how it chooses to model it becomes a statement. If it were obviously ridiculous or gamey like policy cards in Civ 6, or railroaded like politics in previous HoI games or even early builds of 4 before ideology-switching became so common in every focus tree, it would be a bit different.
Revising what I said earlier, I think more austere focus trees constrained by realistic executive authority and consequences at the time would be acceptable, too. What’s funny is they are aware of this: The Soviet Union has no democratic focus path unlike other majors which all get at least the “democratic, communist, fascist” triad of paths, they are willing to acknowledge the absurdity of the Soviet Union reforming into a Liberal Democracy at this time due to path dependency, yet not of the Indian National Congress compromising to Home Rule or Federation of Equals. Or of Stalin being removed from power at all at this point.
And now I’m rambling point to point: I think it would make it all the more special and unique for countries that have realistic paths to change their alignment and give them a unique strategic appeal. Consider the Republic of Turkey, for instance, that it’s still in a phase of defining the very identity of its republic (within constraints laid out by the Turkish republican movement’s vision and opposition), that is a sort of flexibility advantage that it has going into an era of global ideological conflict. Perhaps that’s just the part of me that likes the recent overhaul to Japan’s tree, though, for acknowledging that Japan is still a dying democracy at game start. “Saving a dying democracy” is a strategic challenge few games offer and I cherish it where it exists even though it still suffers from the lack of depth endemic to the game’s political systems and lack of reward for being a democracy.
After playing Rule the Waves 3, I’ve come to a strong conclusion what would fix this: Remove Focuses from the Game and lock players into historical governments. Then the government systems being broad and shallow wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem. Even the compression is fine in theory since its meant to reflect broader global geopolitical alignments/basic state structure, or hybrid/none in nonaligned, rather than particular ideological beliefs.
Great article and series so far Bret!
I think the game’s theory of politics is more generically authoritarian than explicitly fascist, but generally democracies feel the same but worse than authoritarian countries in the early game.
I think some of this arises from the phenomena that in the modern west we seem institutionally bad at articulating what democracies are good at, perhaps a ‘fish in water’ problem. I recall a recently retired senior British government official who was a guest lecturer on my MA outright saying that democracies can’t do long term planning as well as authoritarian states, which felt lacking.
The authoritarian countries should have a brittle quality to them where compounding setbacks might result in collapse as a negative to the more immedeate options at hand. The dictator has a secret police and surveillance system and no issue with violence as a way to deal with dissent/uprising/partisans, but still has to keep certain groups happy or the very means of repression stop being reliable. An Italy style collapse should be plausible for Germany, Japan or the USSR (and arguably happened in slow motion in Nationalist China). The ‘Selectorate’ concept might be useful here.
A mechanism akin to the EU4/5 estate system might work, with your default selectorate groups as ‘the party’ ‘the military and ‘the businessmen’ (the latter as ‘the managers/planners’ for communists) with bespoke names/interactions for the major countries. Something that might simulate why Germany was slow to mobilise the civilian population for industry, and things like the 20th of July plot or the Italian collapse.
I agree with basically all your points, but I think you’re overstating some parts along the way. Here’s a list in no particular order:
Commenting two weeks late here, but it struck me when reading the discussion of meme politics and the focus button that a lot of the same ideas infect popular ideas around space settlements. And the epitome of this approach might be For All Mankind, the show on Apple TV. It’s a great show btw. BUT, the premise, especially as we get to later seasons, is that if the United States had just kept its finger on the “space focus” button, we would have had a permanent moon base in the 1970’s, hotels in orbit by 1992, humans on Mars by the mid-1990’s, and permanent Martian settlements by 2003. (And also fusion power? Apparently the various energy crises and billions of dollars in investment haven’t been enough incentive to crack the problem of usable fusion power, but if we’d only added the sheer awesomeness of SPAAAACE we would have it in the bag already.) Economics and physics are irrelevant when the WILL is there — so in this world it makes sense that North Korea somehow lands a crewed vessel on Mars because they just had so much will to do it.
Anyway, yeah good show but very much built on this Grand Strategy game idea that countries can just decide to focus on a tech tree and make it happen.
In defense of the earlier stuff, if we really wanted to we probably could have had a permanent moonbase in the 1970s using the technology for space stations, probably a fission reactor for nighttime power, and an objectively unreasonable number of Saturn V launches. There just wasn’t a real point to doing that and it would be very expensive and the US had already gotten the symbolic Space Race win of Apollo 11, but with the premise that the Soviets somehow pull off a Moon landing first I could see it happening to restore national confidence that freedom and capitalism will prevail in the Cold War.
Then space hotels are just space stations with fancy interiors and we could have made one in 1992 if somehow we were willing to pay for it although there’s no actual valid reason to do so.
On the other hand I hadn’t heard much about the later seasons. North Korea does a manned Mars mission? Even with an extended Space Race expediting tech development I have trouble seeing a manned landing by the US on Mars by 2003.
But in general a nation making a committed effort backed by a good chunk of the national budget to advance a technology does tend to advance that technology, albeit not necessarily in the fashion envisioned beforehand.
Involved ? But does the word “involve” is even necessary here ?
You get a better occupation law so there is effectively at least one benefit exclusive to democracies albeit far of the advantages of other regimes.
Word choice fixed; as I note elsewhere, occupation policy doesn’t strike me as a very forceful mechanic.