Those instances of totally unanticipated alternate-history blowouts that colour your campaign with accidental dilemmas and stand as watershed moments in the course of your national pursuits.įortuitous or not, the thrill of desperately responding to a global turn of events that you had nary considered – only to find it increasingly eating up your cognitive focus until you’ve totally forgotten whatever it was your nation was trying to achieve before – beats any hard-nosed military-economic plan. It’s a gas.įar from creating obsolete headaches that stall your plans of domination, it’s these moments of flagrant, ill-thought-out, and largely unnecessary actions that produce the most exciting moments of play. But just you watch as your half-baked, half-hearted effort at ideological dissemination turns into a full-scale rebellion, and Argentina becomes the next hotbed of fascist domination. Irrelevant to your immediate goals and serving little purpose other than draining your prestige? You betcha. Head to South America and boost party popularity of whatever political ideology you’ve aligned with. Or you may take your exploits to some far-flung nation to see what pesky trouble you can stir. Ill-thought-out actions often produce the most exciting moments of play Hearts of Iron 4 isn’t a game to be furiously bettered it plays best when you simply don’t have a clue. The moments of greatest enjoyment that I’ve taken from the game haven’t come about through shrewd management or overly-scrupulous implementation of strategic forethought they’ve arisen while I’m bunglingly my way through its systems. Far from offering the most rewarding gameplay experience, approaching Hearts of Iron 4 as a scenario to be optimised, or a problem that must be efficiently resolved, undermines its most enthralling elements. Strive for efficiency, and count down the days until you can laugh in the face of its online wiki, safe in the knowledge that your expertise will keep your strategic expansion afloat every single time.īut I smell a sham. The better you can tailor your warring into a rigorous methodology, the better the game you’ll play. Sink an eye-watering number of hours into its WWII simulation until every popup panel is ingrained in your eyeballs, and no mechanic leaves you dazed. Let no strategic opportunity go to waste leave no production capability un-optimised. Internalise its rules, and iterate upon your attempts at global expansion at every opportunity, and you’ll grasp its boundaries, better capable of leveraging those opportunities of creative play, and thrilling excursions of unanticipated warfare. It offers an open-ended world of far-reaching scenarios, but only to those players prepared to put in the time to learn its many systems and interrelated mechanical flows.

Like all of Paradox Interactive’s hulking grand strategy titles, it’s a game of rigour.

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