With every aggressive action around the globe adding to the overall percentage, the fascist countries want to keep it as low as possible, and so need to be cautious in their actions if they’re not yet ready for war, and this in turn restricts what the democracies can do. World Tension is a very interesting addition to the game, as it really dictates the flow of the game for the major powers. That, as it turned out, was our folly, as these relentless invasions saw the new measure of World Tension rapidly head towards 100% after the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War – one of a number of scripted events within the game. Italy, meanwhile, was desperately invading anyone and everyone that they possibly could, searching for any and all natural resources that could be used to turn them into a major player in a scrap against the allied forces. My stint as Hungary was generally a quiet one – I was the little country near the middle of the above image – as I gradually built up my ground troops and tried to prepare myself for the inevitable war. There wasn’t any opportunity to really stop and think, as there is when you can simply press pause in single player, and that added a degree of pressure to get everything set up within your country, to get the production lines rolling and turning out trained units to prepare for the inevitable war. It was also a lot of fun, as Allied and Axis countries conspired and worked together to aim for victory, sweeping up neutral countries to fight alongside them wherever possible.Īn artificial limitation, we had the game time ticking by at an accelerated rate. Having twenty-two players sat down in the same room to play Paradox Interactive’s upcoming WW2 grand strategy game certainly isn’t going to be a typical scenario for most of those that plan to play it once released, and yet it also exposed a number of nuances to the game that I likely wouldn’t have found by muddling my way through the single player version of the game. Getting the best out of a country’s industry is tricky for a relative newcomer such as myself, but luckily the first country that I played as was the relative minnow of Hungary – certainly compared to the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – and I had the benefit of being surrounded by a roomful of people from whom I could ask advice. Though making the game more accessible is a goal for Paradox, there’s currently no tutorial, which makes learning some of its many quirks rather difficult – how you assign airforces to battle over a particular region, for example, or adding units to a general’s command – and there are still plenty of rough edges and flaws on show.
There are a huge number of things to juggle at any one time, making the ability to pause the game incredibly useful, even though we didn’t use this when playing multiplayer.
HEARTS OF IRON 4 WORLD TENSION HOW TO
You have to learn how to build factories and infrastructure, choose new technologies to research, set up and protect trade routes, train troops and create divisions, assign those divisions to a leader, manage the front lines and assist them with air power. Of course, this manifests itself into something that initially appears to be utterly impenetrable and impossible to understand.