{"id":7063282,"date":"2026-09-21T18:20:56","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T18:20:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/american-history\/operational-art-a-collection-of-unmitigated-pedantry\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T18:20:56","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T18:20:56","slug":"operational-art-a-collection-of-unmitigated-pedantry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7063282","title":{"rendered":"Operational Art \u2013 A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry"},"content":{"rendered":"


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This week, at long last, we begin our long-delayed but always expected something that we blog for: the Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> Teaching Paradox<\/em> series!<\/strong> This has been a long requested series that I put off for a long time because I wasn\u2019t entirely sure how I wanted to tackle it. But my thoughts here have at least congealed somewhat.<\/p>\n

So we are going to cover Paradox Interactive\u2019s most popular strategy title: Hearts of Iron IV<\/em>. And make no mistake: Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> is popular<\/strong><\/em>, more so than any other Paradox game by some distance. These days, Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> generally has more concurrent players on Steam than even strategy stalwarts like Sid Meier\u2019s Civilization<\/em> (VI, because apparently no one likes VII), Age of Empires IV<\/em>, Mount & Blade Bannerlord<\/em>, etc. Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> isn\u2019t just the most popular Paradox<\/em> game, it is the most popular strategy game<\/em> \u2013 the whole genre \u2013 right now<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

And that makes its historical assumptions well worth talking about. This week we\u2019re going to look at how Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> simulates military operations, something that in practice makes up probably three-quarters of the player\u2019s experience in the game. Then in the following weeks we\u2019ll look at the strategic \u2018shell\u2019 around that operational core, with how the game understands industry, information, strategy and politics.<\/p>\n

As with other entries in this series (Europa Universalis IV,<\/a> Victoria II<\/a><\/em>, Crusader Kings III<\/a><\/em> and Imperator<\/a><\/em>) the goal here isn\u2019t a review of the game or a guide to it, but instead an effort to outline what the historical assumptions<\/em> of a given game are, what its \u2018theory of history\u2019 is<\/strong>, and to try \u2013 to a degree \u2013 to assess that theory of history against what we actually know of the history.<\/p>\n

Especially in this particular section, focused on how Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> handles land combat, I found I struggled quite a bit to describe how the game simulates operations without getting pulled into how a player might design good<\/em> operations. As a result, for HoI4<\/em> players, this first post may end up feeling a bit surface-level in its description of the game, but this is unavoidable: I want these posts to be intelligible to someone who has never played the game, after all. But whereas with other Paradox games I can often leave the \u2018grand tactics\u2019 of maneuvering armies out without losing too much of the core of the game, Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> is almost all maneuvering armies<\/strong><\/em>. It thus cannot be left out, but at the same time, this is not the place for the minutiae of how to conduct an armored breakthrough.<\/p>\n

Finally, I should note at the outset that while I bought my own copy of Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> (ages ago) and have spent far too much<\/em> money on its DLCs, Paradox did kindly provide me with copies of some of the expansion packs that were missing from my collection (mostly things in the second \u2018Expansion pass\u2019).<\/p>\n

But first, if you like what you are reading here, please share it, as I rely on word of mouth to replenish my manpower pool after poorly considered post topics. If you really like it, you can support me, my academic work and my public writing, including this project on Patreon<\/a>! I can\u2019t promise to use your support to buy a division worth of tanks, but I also will not promise not to do that. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis<\/em> presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).<\/p>\n

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On of Hearts of Iron IV<\/em>\u2018s loading screens, showing an artistic rendering of a famous photo<\/a> of American troops unloading on Omaha Beach during D-Day. The Hearts of Iron<\/em> series has been in a habit for some time of basing at least some of its key artwork directly off of famous WWII photos, another way the game builds verisimilitude and attempts to communicate to its audience that it is trying to present a historically grounded vision of the Second World War.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Operations<\/h2>\n

In past series on Paradox grand strategy titles, we\u2019ve talked about how it is often possible to summarize these games (especially the way they are different from each other) in terms of what each game is \u2018about\u2019 \u2013 its core focus. Europa Universalis IV<\/em> is a game about states<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, while Crusader Kings III<\/em><\/a> is a game about personalistic rule and thus the personal relationships that define it and Victoria II<\/em> is a game about pops<\/a> (while Victoria III<\/em> lives at the intersection of pops, economics and politics). That isn\u2019t to say these games don\u2019t include other things of course, but there is a clear central concept, an idea the game wants to explore most.<\/p>\n

Hearts of Iron IV is a game about<\/strong> what in military theory we call operations<\/em><\/strong>. Indeed it is substantially more focused<\/em> on operations than its predecessors (Hearts of Iron II <\/em>and III<\/em>; I never played the original Hearts of Iron<\/em> and so won\u2019t comment on it here) in that it streamlines everything but<\/strong><\/em> operations (e.g. research, industry, politics, espionage) in order to more clearly focus on the game\u2019s major focus (though it then allows you to automate<\/em> a fair chunk of the operations to try to control the complexity).<\/p>\n

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And as usual we are going to be running a campaign roughly in parallel with the series. I opted for a run as the United Kingdom because it offers a very \u2018fully featured\u2019 run that interacts with basically all of the games systems. Now I should note that I did not do this run on Ironman because I needed to be able to drop saves at regular intervals to pull screenshots. However, for the sake of establishing my United Kingdom Ironman Cred, I present the following screenshot of my achievements list:<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Yes, including India. We\u2019re actually going to repeat this focus in this run as well, mostly because it exemplifies how deeply silly Hearts of Iron IV\u2019s \u2018meme politics\u2019 can get, but I have done it, on Ironman, quite a while ago.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now talking about this a bit tricky, because I want to say that Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> is fundamentally about what we might call the operational level of military analysis or even the operational level of war. But the idea that there is a distinct operational \u2018level,\u2019 despite being part of United States military doctrine, is disputed by some current military theorists (if you want to read perhaps the clearest such dispute, see B.A. Friedman, On Operations: Operational Art and Military Disciplines<\/a><\/em> (2021), which I find very persuasive on most of its point). But I don\u2019t want to bog us down unpacking those arguments, which have to do with the nature of operations, the degree to which operational planning is actually a kind of \u2018grand tactics,\u2019 or the history of the idea (or lack of it) in Soviet \u2018Deep Operation<\/a>\u2018 doctrine.<\/p>\n

And I don\u2019t think I have to, because there may or may not really be<\/em> an \u2018operational level\u2019 of war between tactics and strategy, but \u2018operational art\u2019 as commonly understood in the West is the focus of Hearts of Iron IV<\/em><\/strong>, so the term is useful for us regardless of its applicability to real war. Though, of course, the fact that it remains common in modern military doctrine should suggest that it is, to some degree, applicable.<\/p>\n

So what do we mean when we say \u2018operations,\u2019 \u2018operational art\u2019 or even an \u2018operational level of war?\u2019 We have discussed the three levels of military analysis<\/a> a few times on the blog, but it has been a while and so is worth reviewing. The three levels are tactics (how<\/em> you fight), operations (where<\/em> you fight) and strategy (why<\/em> you fight). To expand on those shorthand definitions, tactics (the lowest layer of analysis) concerns the method used to win battles (broadly defined): maneuver, positioning, stratagems, and so on. Strategy (the uppermost layer) considers the overall objectives a state, polity or organization has, the ways those objectives can be achieved (including the decision not to have a war<\/em>) and the resources required to achieve those objectives, a set of components short-handed in US military doctrine as \u2018Ends, Ways and Means.\u2019 Grand<\/em> strategy is sometimes treated as its own layer, which broadens the analysis to include political, diplomatic and economic tools and concerns, though I would tend to argue that all strategy is grand strategy: states do not have ends, ways or means that are ever wholly divorced from political, diplomatic and economic tools.<\/p>\n

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Now we\u2019re going to cover the \u2018strategic layer\u2019 of Hearts of Iron IV in later posts, so I am mostly going to \u2018fast forward\u2019 here from the 1936 start date to the beginning of the war proper in 1939, but I want to lay out my self-imposed \u2018rules\u2019 for a United Kingdom run, as well as my early approach.
The rules are: historical focuses (making countries more or less act historically) are on; as the United Kingdom, I follow \u2018historical\u2019 decision-making until the outbreak of war in 1939 (no early war by rejecting the Munich Agreement, etc), no new division recruitment until the Anschluss of Austria and no meaningful military rearmament until the militarization of the Rhineland. Finally, no nuclear weapons, no cheesy division templates (\u2018space marines\u2019), and no paratroopers (which are highly exploitable against the AI).
The aims are to keep France in the war (by winning the Battle of France) and then to win the war against the Axis without the USSR entering the war if possible and then \u2013 assuming I can find an opportunity given the limits to diplomacy and war declaration \u2013 to recover all<\/strong> of Poland, including the chunk seized by the USSR (which will require war with the USSR as there\u2019s no option to negotiate on this point).
In addition, the aim is to also leave the United Kingdom in a \u2018great power\u2019 position at war\u2019s end, rather than broke or ailing, which means completing the Imperial Federation focus we\u2019ll discuss later. Ideally, we want \u2018maximum Britain\u2019 which means an Imperial Federation achieved with<\/strong><\/em> India.
That\u2019s the goal.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In this schema, operations is the layer that knits strategy<\/strong> together with tactics<\/strong>. Ideally the decision-making process begins with strategy, where it is determined that the best (or perhaps only) way to achieve to achieve a strategic end-state is through warfare. Operations is thus occupied with the question of how to reach that strategic end-state, whatever it might be, through the use of military force<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In practice, that generally means that operations takes the strategic end-state (\u2018compel the surrender of Germany\u2019) and then designs military campaigns to achieve that objective, which of course means first asking, \u2018what would cause Germany to surrender?\u2019 Often this means making decisions about what theaters to prioritize (\u2018should I fight in France or in North Africa or in Italy?\u2019), which all of the follow-on considerations of logistics, transport and movement in space and time. The maneuver component of this \u2013 planning the movement of often very large armies over vast spaces \u2013 strongly resembles a sort of \u2018super-sized tactics\u2019 and indeed the idea is often termed \u2018grand tactics\u2019 which in some contexts has a similar meaning.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the best way to exemplify this is with a reasonably direct example, so let us posit Napoleon\u2019s Ulm Campaign (1805). Napoleon had decided that he needed to knock Austria out of the war (\u2018ends\u2019) and that the best way to do this was the destruction of Austria and Russia\u2019s armies, with Austria coming first, (\u2018ways\u2019) using Napoleon\u2019s army (\u2018means\u2019) \u2013 all strategic level concerns.<\/p>\n

Now comes the operational art<\/strong><\/em>: how to best employ his army (the means) to those ends. Napoleon opts for a campaign of rapid maneuver so that he could concentrate a much larger French army against a smaller and isolated Austrian army before Russian (or other Austrian) help could arrive. To do that<\/em>, he would have to march each piece of his army (his army corps, of which he had six in motion for the campaign) along separate routes (to make maximum use of roads<\/a> and supplies<\/a>), while carefully managing their movement (\u2018space and time\u2019) to make sure they all arrived where the Austrians were at the same time (to avoid being picked off one by one). At the same time, managing the dispersed movement of several large armies meant managing the logistics of these forces, as the campaign would last almost a month (and could have lasted longer) in hostile territory.<\/p>\n

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Via Wikipedia<\/a>, a map of the Ulm Campaign, showing the maneuvers of Napoleon\u2019s corps.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Finally, the question of how to actually beat<\/strong><\/em> the Austrians once Napoleon\u2019s forces arrived would be a question of tactics.<\/p>\n

Operations<\/strong> is thus often concerned with the use of maneuver (both the \u2018where\u2019 and the \u2018how fast\u2019), logistics and terrain to create favorable conditions where battles can both be won and also be decisive or at least contribute<\/em> to strategic ends. Now as a \u2018level of war\u2019 coequal with strategy and tactics, operations can and indeed must be more<\/em> than just that, because it would have to consider uses of force beyond simply maneuvering against enemy armies in the field for the purpose of battles, but that frame will serve us pretty well here because it is the frame Hearts of Iron<\/em> adopts across the entire series. Which is not a critique: this is a game about World War II, which was very substantially a war concerned with large conventional armies maneuvering in the field.<\/p>\n

It is thus perhaps both ironic and telling that Hearts of Iron<\/em>, arguably the<\/strong><\/em> modern military strategy game, is fundamentally a game about operations, not strategy<\/strong> (though the latter is present).<\/p>\n

\"\"
Now we fast forward to the start of the war in Europe in 1939. Historically, the British Expeditionary Force in France was 13 divisions. I have 55 divisions here in France ready to go at the start of the war. That\u2019s necessary because France in Hearts of Iron IV is much, much weaker than it was historically<\/strong>. German success in the Battle of France was, in a sense, an unlikely outcome, but the developers clearly feel like they need to make it likely<\/strong> and they do that by making France (and to a lesser extent Britain) much weaker than they were.
The \u2018trick\u2019 for offsetting this is more preparation but also more intentional use of manpower from Britain\u2019s Empire. In order to allow me to deploy almost all of my available manpower onto the continent, I actually guard Britain\u2019s coastline with divisions recruited in British Malaya, using a compact, relatively cheap division template that is just good enough to avoid anything truly silly (this approach was more necessary back when naval invasions didn\u2019t require establishing sea control first).
That lets me move basically all of my recruitable manpower into France, where it is supplemented by a number of divisions recruited in India. It is necessary to be careful here: Indian divisions fighting in Europe will push India towards greater autonomy, so I don\u2019t want too many of them, but they make great second-row divisions and they also let me stretch a thin curtain over the Maginot Line in case the French AI does something dumb (as it used to do somewhat regularly).
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Divisions and Lines<\/h2>\n

Perhaps the most immediately striking and overwhelming element of HoI4<\/em>\u2018s visual presentation is how it simulates and represents armies in order to facilitate a game about operations. Whereas in other Paradox titles, armies generally exist as a single \u2018stack\u2019 that occupies one point on the map (a province, for instance), in HoI4<\/em> (and the earlier HoI<\/em> titles) armies are broken out into divisions, which, rather than being concentrated at a single point on the map, are instead spread out, typically in clear front lines, often along borders.<\/p>\n

There are a few mechanics that push players towards this different way of organizing armies. First, whereas other Paradox games feature \u2018armies\u2019 as \u2018stacks\u2019 (groups that operate as one) of units, HoI4<\/em> treats the division as an almost \u2018atomic\u2019 unit. While divisions are (in ways we\u2019ll get to) composed of smaller units, they cannot be merged or split apart and while they can be put in the same province they cannot be \u2018stacked.\u2019 A division which is defeated in a combat will not wait for the other divisions in the same combat to be defeated, but will retreat all on its own. In practice, the division functions as a UI element the same way an entire army \u2018stack\u2019 in Paradox\u2019s other games does. The player is thus strongly encouraged to think about divisions as the \u2018base unit\u2019 of their operational approach<\/strong> (with implications in both nature and scale we\u2019ll get to).<\/p>\n

Moreover, the game gives players a lot of reasons not to group their divisions up. Battles, when they occur, have limited frontage and inflict penalties (both frontage penalties and stacking penalties) if there are too many divisions involved in the combat; at the very least excess divisions cannot participate (but have their organization, strength recovery and movement frozen), which makes it a bad use to have excess divisions in a single engagement.<\/p>\n

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A closer look at what a front line (where France meets Germany) can look like. Each little box (green for the player, blue for friendly, red for enemy) indicates divisions, with the number in the small box indicating how many of that type and the little green icon indicating the division type (a horse for cavalry, a helmet for infantry, etc). When Hearts of Iron IV released, a LOT of players complained about the lack of an option to use APP-6 NATO military symbols<\/a> for divisions (\u2018NATO counters\u2019). It was a huge, fiery, player-dividing flame-fest. Now no one cares and this is the most popular strategy game on the market. Make of that what you will.
In terms of these divisions, I\u2019ll get to my template a bit later, but it is artillery heavy (a 9\/1 with full supports), because the United Kingdom is long on industry but short on manpower. I have to spend steel instead of blood, especially if I want to have anyone left at the end to potentially fight the USSR.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But perhaps most significantly the logistics system<\/strong> compels spread out as well: divisions in Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> do not just draw from the supply capacity of the province they\u2019re in (they\u2019re already mostly too big!), but rather they pull from a nearby supply hub<\/strong> (which may be several provinces away) and thus need a clear, friendly path to that supply hub<\/strong>. Supply hubs, in turn, have a limited capacity to support units. They can \u2013 in a system we\u2019ll talk about later in the series \u2013 draw supply at greater distance, but that throughput is limited. Consequently, most states already have armies too large to be supported by a single supply hub<\/strong>. As a result the AI and the player generally cannot \u2018doomstack\u2019<\/strong> (place all or nearly all of their combat units in a single, massive formation, located all together) as in other strategy titles<\/strong>. The player is forced to spread their divisions over multiple supply hubs to maintain them.<\/p>\n

Even more importantly, far more so than in almost any other mainstream strategy game, it is very bad if enemies get behind you<\/strong><\/em> in Hearts of Iron IV<\/em>. An enemy division between<\/em> your divisions and your supply hubs blocks their supply, forcing them out of supply, with catastrophic penalties to combat power and steady attrition which depletes their equipment. Indeed much of the (grand) tactics of Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> is about finding ways to isolate enemy units from their sources of logistics<\/strong> (which makes sense as this is a core element of operational art). Consequently most of the time, the player or AI will want to leave no gaps<\/em> in their lines which might allow enemy units to encircle them<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Finally, that \u2018no gaps\u2019 approach is facilitated by HoI4<\/em>\u2018s \u2018movement is attack\u2019 design, which is shares with no other mainland Paradox series. In every other Paradox game, for one army to attack another, it must arrive<\/em> in the same province, but in Hearts of Iron<\/em> (the whole series) a division initiates combat the moment it begins<\/em> to enter a province with an enemy division and cannot finish moving into that province until it has won the battle<\/strong><\/em>, displacing the enemy division out of the province (by depleting its organization, forcing its retreat). <\/p>\n

The result is a very<\/em> different combat system, where wars (or at least theaters in wars) resemble two lines of divisions stretching over many provinces \u2018shoving\u2019 each other with offensive battles, as opposed to the \u2018point location\u2019 battles of other Paradox titles or indeed, other strategy games (e.g. the Total War<\/em> series) more generally.<\/p>\n

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Jumping ahead to 1940 (1939 on historical provides few options for Britain to go on the attack against Germany as the small front line is very difficult terrain), I\u2019ve managed what Churchill could not and successfully intercepted the German amphibious attack on Norway. over the course of two naval battles, I bag most of the Kriegsmarine\u2019s surface fleet.
I\u2019m not sure how much we\u2019ll touch on naval warfare in this series, but my approach is to spend the interwar period building (in part) a few more battlecruisers that can make 28 knots as a sort of \u2018budget fast battleship\u2019 to combine with Britain\u2019s starting fleet carriers to make a deadly fast attack group: fast enough to dash out from Britain to \u2018catch\u2019 German fleets spotted off the coast of Denmark. And with 5 BCs, 6 CAs and 4 CVs, more than enough firepower to rumble with any potential European enemy except perhaps the Regia Marina (and even then, I think I\u2019d have the edge).
You wouldn\u2019t want to try to solo the Pacific War with it, but I don\u2019t intend to. It is \u2018enough,\u2019 which lets me focus on anti-submarine work with the rest of my dockyards and direct everything else I have towards the war on the continent.
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Iron Operations<\/h2>\n

The result is that \u2018battles\u2019 (large-scale engagement consisting of multiple attacks over connected provinces, the way we\u2019d understand the \u2018Battle of France\u2019 or the \u2018Battle of Stalingrad\u2019 given their scale) in Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> are a lot more granular than in other Paradox titles. In Europa Universalis<\/em>, the player puts together an army, throws it against the enemy army and then hopes for the best: the outcome is heavily shaped by army composition, local terrain and such, but once the player has made the decision to offer battle (or been trapped into it), their active participation is over.<\/p>\n

By contrast, HoI4 <\/em>presents the player with a lot more decisions<\/strong><\/em>. Not just \u2018should I have a battle in this theater\u2019 but \u2018which provinces specifically in this line should I attack first? Which divisions should I use? Should my attacks be sequential or coordinated? How many angles can I attack from?\u2019 and so on. And that is before considering the impact of air or naval operations on the above. The result is something quite like tactics: a skilled player can \u2013 by considering attack directions, which divisions to use, local terrain, logistics considerations and so on \u2013 produce far more successful offensives in a way that the player simply doesn\u2019t have that level of control in other Paradox titles.<\/p>\n

That said, the player isn\u2019t really doing \u2018tactics\u2019 in a typical sense either (indeed in the game \u2018tactics\u2019 are approaches chosen automatically by your simulated generals during an engagement; they\u2019re an explicit part of the game design simulated beneath<\/em> your (operational) layer). The typical considerations of tactics \u2013 use of terrain, overlapping fields of fire, formations, fortifications, small-scale maneuver, suppression and so on \u2013 are at most simulated abstractly through various bonuses and penalties we\u2019ll get to when we discuss the game\u2019s approach to doctrine.<\/p>\n

Because the player\u2019s basic unit of control is the division<\/em><\/strong> (and indeed, the player cannot control anything smaller!) and divisions in WWII were really big<\/em><\/strong>, often as large or larger as entire field armies in earlier periods. Divisions vary substantially in size but range from 10,000 to 25,000 troops. To give a brief sense of how big a formation that is: most readers are probably familiar with E \u201cEZ\u201d Company from Band of Brothers<\/em>; we see them do tactics<\/em> (flanking, encirclement, suppression-and-maneuver). E Company probably feels to most folks like a big-ish unit, with a lot of people (around 140 at any given time) that we meet. E Company was, in fact, just one company (of three) in the 2nd battalion (of three) in the 506th Parachute Infantry regiment (of four, plus a host of supporting elements) in the 101st Airborne Division (which at a typical strength of ~8,000, including support elements, was a small division; US airborne divisions tended to be about half the size of regular infantry divisions). There were, in fact, four<\/em> E Companies in the 101st, along with one E Battery.<\/p>\n

In short, divisions are really big<\/strong> and as a result the concerns for a player whose smallest unit of control is an entire division<\/em> look pretty different from unit tactics for squads, platoons or companies.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Moving ahead, here is the situation in the summer of 1940, as Germany has invaded the Low Countries. With (it\u2019s hard to see) almost 15 divisions in the Ardennes, I have a chunky defense there which acts as the pivot around which another 22 divisions swing up into Belgium.
The cheeky thing here is my 20-odd divisions slated for the Netherlands. The sequencing of Germany\u2019s attack on France and the Low Countries has been much improved, but Germany still tends to declare war on the Netherlands and invade days before it does the same to Belgium, leaving British armies stuck in France watching helplessly as the Netherlands falls, unable to walk across Belgium to stop it. Historically, while there was a lot of confusion due to a lack of Belgian coordination, Germany invaded all three of the Low Countries on the same day (May 10, 1940).
The cheeky thing to do about this is to simply be prepared to ship<\/strong><\/em> British forces to the Netherlands, so I had about 20 divisions read in Calais and Dover, prepared to be shipped into Rotterdam the moment the Germans crossed the Dutch frontier. As a result, I was able to get to Amsterdam, Breda and the northern edge of the Ijsselmeer first and set up defensive positions. The 22 divisions slated for Belgium then pivot around Luxembourg to link on a line that runs from Luxembourg to Liege and then follows the Meuse into the Netherlands before turning north to Utrecht. It\u2019s a defensive line that offers really good terrain on the whole length which is important: we\u2019re going to be here for a while<\/strong>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is also shaped by HoI4<\/em>\u2018s different combat model<\/strong>. As we\u2019ve actually discussed before, in most strategy games, battles tend to be extremely decisive, with armies generally taking enormous casualties<\/a> that render the loser immediately combat incapable. By contrast, in Hearts of Iron<\/em>, each division has two kinds of \u2018health\u2019: a strength <\/strong>rating, which represents the proportion of equipment and manpower the division has available, and an organization<\/strong> rating, which represents the division\u2019s combat effectiveness. Divisions are forced to retreat from combat when their organization<\/strong> hits zero and most damage accrues to organization rather than to strength. But organization replenishes quickly on the game\u2019s time scale (measured in hours). The result is that a division, attacked and defeated by an infantry division, will generally have regenerated its organization substantially by the time it has retreated to the next province<\/strong> and thus be ready to defend again<\/em><\/strong>. Meanwhile strength<\/strong><\/em> damage, assuming the manpower and equipment is available in the country\u2019s stockpile and the logistics route is clear, is replenished very fast compared to the rate at which divisions take strength losses (because most damage accrues to organization), with the result that recently \u2018pushed\u2019 divisions will also generally be at full strength.<\/p>\n

This produces a \u2018shoving match\u2019 rather than decisive battles in HoI4<\/em>\u2018s combat model<\/strong>: you do not (generally) destroy enemy divisions when you defeat them, you merely push<\/em> them. The only reliable way to destroy an enemy division entirely is to defeat it when it has nowhere else to retreat, generally by encircling it. It is, of course, still possible to adopt an attritional strategy<\/strong>, simply aiming to deplete the enemy\u2019s stockpile of manpower and equipment faster than your own \u2013 and that does sometimes happen \u2013 but what the player is generally trying to do<\/em> is to use operational art to move faster than that, either by accelerating attrition or bypassing it altogether. But the tool to do that is taking and holding ground<\/em><\/strong> (provinces), which neatly reorients the players attention to the way that decision-makers at the time thought about it: operations to take or hold specific territory (rather than thinking, in the first instance, about destroying a given army).<\/p>\n

The player\u2019s task, then (which the AI mimics) is to ask, \u201chow do I both achieve shoving<\/em><\/strong> (how do I get the front moving the way I want in the first place) and how do I then move the front line in a way that achieves some greater objective?<\/strong>\u201d It is that latter part that is such a shift because, recall, in a lot of games of this sort simply destroying the enemy<\/em> is the objective, but in Hearts of Iron IV<\/em>, the enemy will not be destroyed (probably), merely moved backwards. So the question becomes not \u2018how do I destroy the enemy?\u2019 but \u2018how do I move them backwards in a way that gets me closer to winning?<\/strong>\u2018<\/p>\n

In short, the player is asking, \u2018how do I bridge the gap between my tactics (being able to shove the enemy) and my strategy (winning the war in a way that achieves my objectives).\u2019 Which (said gesturing upwards energetically) is operations<\/strong><\/em>!<\/p>\n

\"\"
Of course the war isn\u2019t only in Europe so here is some of the action in Africa \u2013 in this case the Horn of Africa \u2013 in June of 1940.
Note the crenellated red line between my territory and the Green (Italy) \u2013 that is an automated front-line. The arrow leading out of it is a automated offensive plan. We\u2019ll talk about these below.
This is also a good example of using logistics<\/strong> in an operation. Supply in this part of the world is mostly coming in by port, so instead of engaging the Italians everywhere, I have focused my forces on the coast with just a thin wing on their left to keep them from being encircled. Instead, the main force punches right up the coast to seize the airbase and Mogadishu, the loss of which leaves all of those Italian divisions to the north cut off from supply and basically helpless.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now I don\u2019t want to get too deep here into \u2018how do be good at Hearts of Iron<\/em>\u2018 but there are a number of different mid-term objectives players might aim to \u2018shove\u2019 for. Perhaps the nearest term is \u2018shoving\u2019 for a better vantage to attack a key location. Cities, mountains, forts, forests and so on can all be really good defensive locations; rivers act as barriers between<\/em> provinces which disadvantage attacks over them. At the scale HoI4<\/em> exists at, you cannot \u2018flank\u2019 these positions (you can encircle them, more on that in a second), however attacking one province simultaneously from multiple directions widens the frontage of the battle, allowing the attacker to get more divisions into the fray, which can offset the defender\u2019s terrain advantage. So often the first objective of a \u2018shove\u2019 is to clear \u2018easier\u2019 provinces (plains, hills, ones not guarded by river-crossings) in order to be able to lever an opponent out of the \u2018hard\u2019 provinces.<\/p>\n

One step up further than that, the player might aim to break out into enemy rear areas and disrupt logistics. As noted above, units need clear, unobstructed path to a friendly supply hub to fight effectively: seizing that hub or pinching the supply route (say, cutting across a key rail line) can render even very favorable positions untenable. The extreme version of this is encirclement<\/strong>, where you \u2018shove\u2019 in a way that cuts off part of the enemy army from any<\/em> route to their capital, which puts them out of supply (with major combat penalties) and creates a pocket. If the player can then close down that pocket (weakened by attrition and supply penalties as the divisions in it cannot be reinforced), left nowhere to run the divisions stuck in the pocket will be destroyed when they can no longer retreat. This is the one reliably way to fully destroy<\/em> a division (along with all of its manpower and equipment) and thus the most powerful way to shift the balance of attrition in your favor.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most importantly, of course, you can want to \u2018shove\u2019 in order to get control over the underlying terrain itself. As we\u2019ll get to later, factories and raw materials in Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> do not exist abstractly, they live on the map<\/em> in specific places \u2013 seizing a key area denies the factories and resources in that area to your enemy, further accelerating an attritional advantage. Key urban centers also are \u2018victory point\u2019 locations: countries are compelled to surrender (capitulate) when a certain majority (typically quite high) of their victory points are taken.<\/p>\n

In some cases, a player may expect to defeat an enemy with a single big initial offensive \u2013 a coup de main<\/em> \u2013 in which case the offensive design is about navigating divisions to key victory points and seizing them while maintaining and protecting the logistics lines that effort creates. But in most cases, it is going to take several \u2018shoves\u2019 to achieve victory and attrition is going to play a role. Consequently, the player might instead plan a single large campaign aiming to seize a key resource zone or industrial area (and finish up with a front line anchored on good defensive terrain for the inevitable counter-attack), which in turn is composed of smaller operations levering the enemy out of the area by seizing logistics hubs or through disruption which is in turn composed of smaller battles that get the front moving and set terrain conditions for successfully attacking key enemy strong-points.<\/p>\n

In short, the player in Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> lives in the space between <\/em>strategy (\u2018win the war\u2019 \u2013 as we\u2019ll see, HoI4<\/em>\u2018s strategic layer is actually much less<\/strong><\/em> developed than comparable games like Victoria III<\/em> or Europa Universalis IV <\/em>or V<\/em>) and tactics (\u2018win the battle\u2019), asking the player to think about how they can win the battles in a way that wins the war<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Meanwhile at the northern end of the Horn of Africa area of operations, I\u2019m also trying to push on key supply centers (while my ships sit off coast making sure there are no reinforcements) and you can see that I\u2019ve made a tiny encirclement here: the two Italian divisions (one infantry, one light armor) caught along the coast have nowhere to retreat to. If attacked, they suffer massive effectiveness penalties; if defeated, instead of being \u2018shoved,\u2019 they are totally destroyed.
At the bottom, you can see the green arrow (with \u201966\u2019 on it) \u2013 that is an active battle indicator showing the Italian AI is desperately trying to break its two trapped divisions out. The green color indicates that this effort is failing (green means the player is winning the combat), because they\u2019re attacking two strong infantry divisions in mountains, which is never going to go well.
By using a few of my \u2018European\u2019 template divisions \u2013 with lots of artillery and other equipment \u2013 in Africa against much weaker Italian divisions, I can often shove them around, though I cannot put these \u2018good\u2019 divisions everywhere, so I have to focus my efforts.
As above, the focus is on picking off key ports (most of which are pretty vulnerable), leaving the rest of the Italian army in this part of Africa to wither on the vine.
North Africa will be more challenging, but not massively so.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Modeling Operations in WWII<\/h2>\n

All of this is somewhat difficult to describe but with luck some of the screenshots here have helped demonstrate, for those who haven\u2019t played the game, how this system works.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s one final set of interacting mechanics here that we need to note which tend to govern the tempo of operations in Hearts of Iron IV<\/em>: entrenchment and planning<\/strong>. Units that stop moving gain \u2018entrenchment<\/strong>\u2018 over time in their current location, which provides a percentage boost to the damage they deal (\u2018attack,\u2019 both \u2018soft\u2019 and \u2018hard\u2019 \u2013 we\u2019ll get into this later) and reduces the damage they take when defending (\u2018defense\u2019). In short, units that sit still in a province get better at defending that province, up to a cap. Full entrenchment is generally a pretty significant bonus and it can be very hard<\/em> to move a group of well-entrenched infantry divisions off of a province with good defensive terrain (usually terrain with penalizes armor).<\/p>\n

Planning<\/strong> works almost exactly like entrenchment except for attacking rather than defending. units assigned to an offensive plan (see below) and set up on the front line gain a planning bonus day by day which increases their attack and reduces they damage they take when attacking (\u2018breakthrough\u2019). Whereas entrenchment instantly drops to zero once a unit moves, the planning bonus degrades slowly once a unit begins attacking and advancing.<\/p>\n

In practice the interaction is this: at the start of an operation, both armies are likely already fully entrenched. To offset that substantial bonus to the defender (which the attacker cannot use \u2013 you do not get your entrenchment bonus when you attack, indeed attacking at all instantly<\/em> sets a division\u2019s entrenchment to zero), the attacker needs to build up a planning bonus, which typically might take something like two weeks of in game time (plus or minus various bonuses). Once that bonus is built up, the attacker strikes, using the planning bonus to overcome the defender\u2019s entrenchment. If both sides are pure infantry, this may still<\/em> not be enough, because infantry is much better at defending than attacking (high \u2018defense\u2019 but terrible \u2018breakthrough\u2019) but armor and airpower can tip the scales in favor of the attacker.<\/p>\n

That said, once the defender is thrown off of their initial positions he loses his entrenchment bonus<\/em>, while the attacker\u2019s planning bonus is only slowly wearing off. The advantage thus swings to the attacker who has created a breakthrough, allowing them to widen gaps and push through to exploit the breakthrough. That said, soon enough the attacker\u2019s planning bonus wears off and the constant attacking and advancing wears down the attackers organization (and equipment\/manpower), leading the balance to shift back to the defender, who then re-entrenches, re-calcifying the lines in a new position. At which point the attacker, if they want to remain on the offensive, has to pick a new spot, set a new plan, resupply and reinforce their divisions, rev up their planning bonus again and then take another \u2018punch.\u2019<\/p>\n

The result of this system is to create discrete, identifiable operations (the game will even name them for you). Players (and the AI) plan around these discrete smaller units of warfare with smaller objectives that occur on an observable rhythm. <\/p>\n

And as a model of operations in World War II, Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> broadly succeeds<\/strong>. There is enough detail in the resource and logistics simulation to model why<\/em> offensives were mounted in the places why were and in the way that they were. The logistics and resource systems create objectives for operations that broadly match those attempted historically and the logistics system is also detailed enough to create the severe logistics hurdles that limited historical operations as well. Playing Britain, for instance, one quickly becomes familiar with the logistics problem in western Egypt and eastern Libya where the lack of infrastructure and rail lines means that as each army pushes forward from its supply bases, it becomes dramatically weaker, which can lead to the same kind of see-saw pattern, for the same reasons, as occurred historically.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the system tends to push players towards doctrinal approaches that were successful historically, more or less. We\u2019ll come back to doctrine in a bit, but players quickly discover that while broad linear offensives (using mostly infantry) can work<\/em>, the more effective approach is finding points on which a lot of very mobile divisions (especially armor) can be focused to create a breakthrough (generally supported by air power), which can enable larger forces to be encircled or have their logistics unmoored. While the game somewhat struggles (as we\u2019ll discuss) to really distinguish between the German and Soviet schools of thought as to maneuver warfare, this nevertheless is maneuver warfare<\/em> and the game mechanics push the player towards that historical solution.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the regular cycle of entrechment, planning, reconstitution and then planning again simulates the logistical and organizational complications that led to the operational tempo during the war. No one was, after all, attacking everywhere all of the time. Instead we can identify clear offensive \u2018pushes\u2019 which required both planning (in that coordinating so many troops and machines required advanced plans) and preparation (in stockpiling the troops, munitions and fuel) which took time. So, for instance, we can identify key major Soviet offensive operations on the Eastern Front: the winter counter-offensive (Dec 1941-May 1942), the failed Kharkov offensive (May, 1942), operations Uranus (encircling Stalingrad) and Mars (Nov 1942), the Soviet Kursk counter-offensive (July, 1943) and so on.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the Hearts of Iron <\/em>series remains extremely popular precisely because it so effectively models the operational level of World War II<\/strong>. This is hardly to say it does so perfectly \u2013 no game is going to fully capture the complexity of such a large war \u2013 but it does so better than any of its competition.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t necessarily make it the \u2018ultimate operational simulator\u2019 however. Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> is built to represent large-scale, division-level operations in World War II. As we\u2019ll get to in later parts of this series, it really struggles to represent other aspects of operations: occupation, administration, dealing with partisans and other \u2018unconventional\u2019 warfare and so on. Notably, those systems are \u2018split off\u2019 from the core operational system, even more so than in previous Hearts of Iron<\/em> titles. It was possible, for instance, in Hearts of Iron III<\/em> to \u2018spawn\u2019 partisan units behind enemy lines during an offensive to represent coordination with resistance forces (as with the D-Day landings, for instance), but not in HoI4<\/em>. The game has relatively little way of simulating, for instance, the way incessant partisan activity behind German lines made it difficult for reserve forces to move quickly enough to contain the Soviet breakout around Stalingrad during Operation Uranus (Nov. 1942) which resulted in the encirclement of Friedrich Paulus\u2019 6th army (along with elements of several other German armies) in a pocket around the city of Stalingrad.<\/p>\n

It likewise struggles a bit to represent some of the fighting in the Pacific Theater where operations were often smaller than a division. The Battle of the Tenaru (Aug 21, 1942), for instance, was a significant allied victory that had a meaningful impact on allied (particularly American) morale in the Pacific, but as an engagement between two regiments (the US 1st Marine Regiment and part of the Japanese 28th Infantry Regiment) it lives entirely below the simulation level of Hearts of Iron IV<\/em>. A player in HoI4<\/em> cannot send a regiment \u2013 much less a detachment of one \u2013 to Gaudalcanal. They must send a whole division<\/em> or nothing \u2013 but for much of the early fighting on Gaudalcanal, neither side was at divisional strength.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, on the whole<\/em>, the system succeeds. Of course the challenge it creates from a game design perspective is that it is very complex<\/strong>. Compared to a game of Europa Universalis V<\/em>, where even a quite large empire might split most of its army into perhaps at most 6 or 7 \u2018stacks,\u2019 the number of maneuver units in HoI4<\/em> is overwhelming. To draw from my screenshots above, in my latest run, my British army in France and the Low Countries in 1939 numbered some 57 divisions and that is, by HoI4 standards, a relatively small army for a major country. For many players, controlling such a large army might be bewildering or alternately frustrating in its granular detail.<\/p>\n

\"\"
About a month after the previous image and you can see that the situation for Italy has basically collapsed. With the loss of all but one key port (and the ports and urban centers are mostly the same), the Italians lacked the supply capacity to maintain their army here, weakening the divisions and allowing me to push basically everywhere. The entire operation here was wrapped up within a month, with a total loss of Italian forces in the region and the restoration of the Ethiopian government.
Historically, Italy had almost 250,000 troops in East Africa when the war started and ended up losing effectively all of them (some 230,000 POWs), while Allied (a mix of British, South African, Ethiopian, Belgian and Free French forces with the British making up the lion\u2019s share) casualties were very low.
So if you thought, \u201conly a computer could be so stupid as to go to war with the British Empire will having a quarter of a million troops basically stranded in East Africa\u201d \u2013 no, actually, Mussolini was that stupid too.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Which brings us to:<\/p>\n

Fronts, Armies and AI Generals<\/h2>\n

Attentive eyes on the screenshots I have been using here (and will keep using) may note that sometimes the map has these wonderful drawn front lines and operational arrows and sometimes it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

That is because one of the innovations of Hearts of Iron IV<\/em><\/strong> was the decision to include a system for automating<\/em> the operations we\u2019ve been describing. In the past I\u2019ve talked about \u2018generations\u2019 of Paradox titles, distinguishing between the very \u2018on rails\u2019 second generation Paradox titles (HoI3,<\/em> Eu3<\/em>, Victoria II<\/em>) and the more simulationist, free-form third generation titles (EU4, Crusader Kings II<\/em> and III<\/em>, Imperator<\/em>). I wonder if the trend that won\u2019t end up defining a \u2018fourth generation\u2019 of Paradox\u2019 games isn\u2019t the effort to enable a greater degree of accessibility \u2013 a broader audience \u2013 by allowing players to simply automate entire systems of the game to a greater or lesser degree. You see a bit of this in Victoria III<\/em> and a lot<\/strong><\/em> of it in Europa Universalis IV<\/em> (where nearly every system can be turned over to AI control), but Hearts of Iron IV<\/em>, despite falling firmly within the third generation chronologically, shows some of the earliest experimentation with this kind of automation with what I am going to call its \u2018war plans system\u2019 which has been part of the game since its launch but was absent in its predecessor, HoI3<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The first part of this system is the highly simplified HoI4<\/em> order-of-battle system<\/strong>. Whereas Hearts of Iron III<\/em> had a fairly complex order of battle system: brigades were grouped into divisions (unlike in HoI4<\/em>, in III<\/em>, brigades could be freely moved between divisions or deployed independently), which were grouped into corps, which were grouped into armies, which were combined into army groups, which were assigned to a theater, which each level having its own commander and a command \u2018range\u2019 in which their bonuses would apply. Each level above the division also had an HQ unit, representing where the commander and his staff were<\/em>.<\/p>\n

HoI4<\/em> radically simplified this<\/strong>: divisions became effectively \u2018atomic\u2019 units \u2013 unable to be divided into their components \u2013 and they are grouped directly into armies (no corps). Each army can have around 25 divisions in it and has one commanding officer, who can<\/em> have an HQ on the map, but does not need to. An Army Group, in turn, can combine up to five armies. As noted above, these are not \u2018stacks\u2019 \u2013 the divisions continue to move independently. While HoI4<\/em> has \u2018theaters,\u2019 these are mostly player-UI elements, they do not provide command bonuses. HoI4<\/em> thus compressed HoI3<\/em>\u2018s six-level org chart into just three: divisions, armies, army-groups.<\/p>\n

However, HoI4<\/em> added automation to those armies: you can assign an army a stretch of frontline and the AI (representing the army commander) will automatically deploy the army\u2019s divisions to defend that front line. The player can then draw an offensive line on the map, indicating where he would like an offensive to end up<\/em> if successful, which creates a war plan at which point divisions begin to accrue their planning bonuses (above). The player can then, at any time, order the army to execute the plan and it will begin attempting to push to the intended \u2018finish\u2019 line, taking provinces in sequence (with some attention given to frontage and using easier-to-take provinces to lever enemies off of harder ones) until it gets there or the player orders a halt. It is also possible, though this system, to order amphibious or airborne operations (and indeed, unlike land-based offensives, they can be conducted no other way).<\/p>\n

It is thus possible in HoI4<\/em> for the player, rather than micro-managing every division, to instead place their armies on the front line and draw arrows where they want them to go and then for the most part let the AI (again, simulating those army and army group generals) \u2018figure out\u2019 how to get there, akin to the way that the leader of a country or a high command (like the Soviet Stavka<\/em> or German OKW<\/em>) would determine general objectives and then let generals \u2018on the ground\u2019 come up with the detailed plans on how to reach them. AI controlled countries use this system exclusively to conduct their warfare.<\/p>\n

And it is easy to see the intent<\/strong><\/em> here and how it aligns with the historical vision of the game. After all, the player in Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> is not a corps commander, they are directing the entire military<\/em> \u2013 land, air and naval assets, industrial production, doctrine and even policy \u2013 of a country. You play as the state<\/em> (and continue to do so even if the government of the state changes; we\u2019ll come back to that), after all. So instead the idea is that the player merely draws the war plans and determined the composition of the armies that will execute each part of the plan (indicated by its own frontline and offensive lines) and then, when the time is right, triggers the plans and lets the simulation handle the messy details of coordinating attacks.<\/p>\n

However, whereas Victoria III<\/em> (which has a similar \u2018automated\u2019 war system) forces the player to use it and does not offer the option for manual control, Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> keeps the ability for players to move divisions manually. My suspicion is that most plays rely on a mix of automation and manual direction, though my impression is that I use rather more manual direction than most, a product of having been playing the series since Hearts of Iron II<\/em> (where no automation option existed). It is not possible to build a planning bonus without a war plan<\/strong>, with the result that even when I am planning to entirely<\/em> manually control an offensive (which I usually do), I will begin by drawing an offensive war plan somewhere<\/em> (it does not matter at all if the arrow is pointing where I intend to go) in order to build that planning bonus. But I\u2019ll then commence the attack by deleting the war plan<\/em> so the AI doesn\u2019t shift divisions around without my say so.<\/p>\n

There are advantages to manual deployment in this way, which mostly gets down to precision control. The army AI has gotten a lot better over the years, but on the defensive it still tends to shift divisions around too much and doesn\u2019t defend in depth effectively. The latter matters a lot because if you are expecting<\/em> to get pushed from a position, it is a good idea to have divisions already place done province back so that they have their full entrenchment bonus when the enemy tries to breakthrough. Likewise, shifting divisions around a front removes their entrenchment bonus, which can be disastrous if done at the wrong time.<\/p>\n

On the offensive, the army AI is reasonable competent but broadly speaking a bit wasteful compared to a player, far more willing to launch attacks that have little chance of succeeding because they\u2019re \u2018part of the plan.\u2019 Consequently when doing large-scale offensives I often leave my leg infantry under AI control on front lines (but without any attack orders) while micro-managing my armored, mechanized and motorized divisions (which are doing most of the attacking): the result is that as I push forward, the front lines automatically adjust, causing my leg infantry divisions to file into and dig in into new positions as the armor advances.<\/p>\n

Most of the Game<\/h2>\n

What I think is most significant, however, for Hearts of Iron IV<\/em>\u2018s view of history is simply that the operational-level simulation is most of the game<\/em><\/strong>. Whereas Victoria III<\/em> completely automates its front lines because warfare is less important<\/em> compared to politics and economics in that game, Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> provides automation tools<\/em> because it invests so much player attention<\/strong><\/em> into the operational level of the game that it becomes simply overwhelming.<\/p>\n

It is difficult to measure just how much Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> is a game about the operational \u2013 rather than strategic \u2013 but the playtime balance in any given \u2018run\u2019 between pre-war and war is instructive, because the strategic layer (political focuses, industry management, research, espionage) work at the same speed both pre-war and during the war, but the operational element becomes massively<\/em> more complex once the shooting starts. In my current UK run, I covered the three years from game start in 1936 to the beginning of the war in 1939 in a single play-session that lasted about four hours (including a break for dinner!). Making it to 1944 (where I am now as I write this) by contrast, took a dozen play sessions over two weeks that took up more than 20 hours.<\/p>\n

So while I cannot speak for the \u2018typical player,\u2019 I would suggest we might place the balance that in a typical run (which usually ends in \u201944 or \u201945 \u2013 few players push past the end of the war and there is almost no content there to play anyway), a player might spend something on the order of three-quarters of their time and attention <\/strong>entirely<\/strong><\/em> on the operational level<\/strong> (including naval and air warfare), with the remaining one quarter<\/em> split over politics, industry, research, espionage and so on.<\/p>\n

And that gets us to perhaps the most important part of Hearts of Iron IV<\/em>\u2018s theory of history: in Hearts of Iron IV<\/em>, \u2018history\u2019 is mostly<\/em> a history of warfare fought on the operational level between conventional armies with division-sized elements<\/strong>. That is, to be clear, not an absurd way to frame a game about World War II. World War II was a lot of other things too, of course \u2013 it was an enormous and incomprehensibly complex conflict \u2013 but in terms of setting a game\u2019s focus, it makes sense.<\/p>\n

However<\/em>, it is important to note everything that gets neglected<\/em> in that focus. Small unit actions are left out, partisan activity is barely simulated, war crimes are entirely removed<\/em> (we\u2019ll get to it), asymmetrical warfare \u2013 often an important part of WWII \u2013 is mostly absent as is the experience of war<\/strong><\/em>. We\u2019ll see this even more as we begin to look at other systems but Hearts of Iron IV <\/strong><\/em>has almost nothing<\/em> to say about the experience<\/em> of World War II<\/strong>; the comparison with Crusader Kings<\/em> or Victoria<\/em>, which have a lot<\/em> to say about the experience of the Middle Ages or industrialization is really marked. The game never asks you to consider the experience of being an individual soldier or worker during these events and it \u2013 for reasons we\u2019ll get to \u2013 really<\/strong><\/em> never asks you to consider the experience of being a civilian caught in the maelstrom of atrocity and violence. It doesn\u2019t even have much to say about the experience of being, say, Sir Claude Auchinleck, sweltering in the heat of North Africa trying to coordinate an offensive and make sense of confusing information while managing (or, in the event, failing to manage) the expectations of Winston Churchill.<\/p>\n

Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> is the most popular Paradox title, by a country mile. It is quite possibly the most popular current strategy game on the market. Its influence is significant enough to be detectable in the patterns of political thinking that show up in both commentary and decision making<\/em>. And yet it is, by far, the narrowest<\/em> Paradox game, with the thinnest vision of history<\/strong>. Again, that is not necessarily a critique \u2013 it is fine<\/em> to make a game about operations<\/strong><\/em>. But Hearts of Iron IV<\/em> is fundamentally a game about operations in WWII<\/strong>, rather than a game about WWII.<\/p>\n

Next week, we\u2019ll start diving into the systems that create the \u2018shell\u2019 around Hearts of Iron IV<\/em>\u2018s impressive operational simulator and I am going to start to have a lot more unkind things to say.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, at long last, we begin our long-delayed but always expected something that we blog for: the Hearts of Iron IV Teaching Paradox series! This has been a long requested series that I put off for a long time because I wasn\u2019t entirely sure how I wanted to tackle it. But my thoughts here […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7063283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[1885,2224,21740,12623,12622],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7063282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-art","tag-collection","tag-operational","tag-pedantry","tag-unmitigated"],"yoast_head":"\nOperational Art \u2013 A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7063282\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Operational Art \u2013 A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This week, at long last, we begin our long-delayed but always expected something that we blog for: the Hearts of Iron IV Teaching Paradox series! 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