game recommendation

I'd like to get some game reviews/recommendations. I've been through a
long period (years, since Imperialism 2, basically) playing no strategy
games. I decided to end this, and I'd heard enough good things about
the following games that I bought "Strategy Pack 6" for $40, which
includes the games

Crusader Kings
Victoria
Victoria Revolutions
Europa Universalis II
Hearts of Iron II
Hearts of Iron Doomsday

Now I'm wondering where to start. This is of course a completely
subjective decision, so maybe instead of telling me which game I should
play first, can anyone tell me what you like or don't like about any of
them? If you've played several of them, how do they compare?

I've looked through old posts in this group and found links for
VickyWiki and EU2Wiki; any similar information would also be helpful.

Thanks a lot.

J <invalid.RemoveThis@comcast.net> writes:

>I'd like to get some game reviews/recommendations. I've been through a
>long period (years, since Imperialism 2, basically) playing no strategy
>games. I decided to end this, and I'd heard enough good things about
>the following games that I bought "Strategy Pack 6" for $40, which
>includes the games

> Crusader Kings
> Victoria
> Victoria Revolutions
> Europa Universalis II
> Hearts of Iron II
> Hearts of Iron Doomsday

>Now I'm wondering where to start. This is of course a completely
>subjective decision, so maybe instead of telling me which game I should
>play first, can anyone tell me what you like or don't like about any of
>them? If you've played several of them, how do they compare?

First, eliminate all plans for ever doing anything else in your
entire life. That's where I've started and it's worked out great.

Of these games, I think Europa Universalis II is the easist to
play, which does not in this case mean that it's all that obvious. This
family of games assumes you like keeping track of thousands of bits of
information while playing in a universe of two hundred active nations,
which can be a bit of a challenge if you're still in line with the quick
and simple games like Civilization III.

However, Europa Universalis II gives most of the basics about a
rather straightforward economy, diplomatic model (you give cash out to
improve relations; you can form Royal Marriages and Alliances; you now
and then get caught in wars). The tutorial is impotant yet will not
actually make the game familiar; I think the best training ground is to
use the Revolutionary War/Age of Revolutions scenarios, playing as the
United States. (The United States is usually the easiest to play, due
to the geographic advantages it has.)

There you start out with fighting the war of independence, yes,
but that's worth keeping straight and amounts to mostly moving armies
to where you want them. The game does its own battle-level simulation.
Don't be scared of losing provinces; they're not lost for good until the
peace talks, and the game even gives you a little panel giving your war
score and the war score you need to really get away with what you claim
at the peace talks, so you can get a rough idea of how realistic your
ambitions are.

After winning peace with Britain you can go to work building the
nation's economy and researching technology and the like, and this gives
a feel of how to understand this game.

Once you're comfortable with the basic workings of the game you
can plunge into something more challenging, like the Grand Campaign, and
a start from one of the imminent Great Powers -- England and France have
the best potential, I think; but Aragon and Castile, in Europe, have got
their good sides, and Poland or Austria could be worked with too, but
will have much more turbulent times.


From there, I think that Crusader Kings -- which I don't really
have mastered yet -- is the most straightforward follow-up. It makes
the diplomatic model more complicated, and there's more development of
the economic model, but it's of an essentially similar kind of game.
The critical difference there is you want the maintenance of a dynasty,
with territory not necessarily that important, and you really can't go
around annexing territory even from disloyal dependants without getting
into a lot of trouble since administration of governments was just not
that good in the 1066-to-1453 era. England's a good pick here, since
it has power and enough isolation that it doesn't have to deal with the
most complicated parts of Europe, though.


Hearts of Iron II is really quite compelling and also a pretty
natural follow-on to Europa Universalis II. This is the hour-by-hour
World War II simulator. Once again the United States is the easy
nation to play (that has anything interesting to do in the war), since
you can pretty well live without budgeting carefully and conserving
resources and manpower.

A strong navy depends on having some capital ships -- battleships
and aircraft carriers -- surrounded by fleets of escorts -- destroyers
and the like; if you have one without the other you're going to be cut
down in many sad news reports. You also need to keep troop transport
ships well-guarded since they are otherwise helpless. But naval fleets
can be set on nice, routine missions like ``patrol this sector of the
ocean on anti-submarine warfare duty'' or ``anti-convoy duty'' or ``naval
engagement missions'' or the like, so that's actually straightforward,
to a good extent. (The regions are predefined by the game, and there's
a map which shows exactly where the regions are.) Destroying convoys
chokes off a nation's imports and support of overseas fleets;
destroying navies, obviously, destroys their ability to hamper your
activities.

To win the war on land you need ground troops -- infantry,
marines, cavalry, et cetera -- which can have attachments like
artillery units and anti-tank brigades. They in turn have to be
supported by aircraft, which come in a bewildering array of options.
So the air forces need to be balanced among fighters, tactical
bombers, strategic bombers, and a few other variants like naval
bombers and troop transports. They too can be set to generic missions
like ``air superiority'' (shoot down enemy planes), ``strategic
bombardment'', and ``ground attack'', over entire geographic regions,
so they can be set to cover the front line and you can move your
armies in without keeping close watch over them.

It's absolutely essential to keep supply lines open, and to
keep reinforcements flowing, but happily Hearts of Iron II can be set
to handle convoys automatically and the reinforcement need is given
by a slider bar on the production screen, so this is reasonbly painless.

A new twist is the Headquarters Unit, which makes for better
management of any armies which are doing anything in the province in
which the Headquarters is found, or working from any adjacent province
(meaning you can attack as far as two provinces away and draw its
benefit). Use them. It means you can have many more troops in your
attack without them shooting each other by mistake.

Also a new twist is you can have both ``attack'' and ``support
attack'' missions -- one unit can be sent to actually take the new
province, while the other armies just support the attacking without
going to a new location. Similarly there's a ``support defense'' if
you find a province suddenly under attack and have units in the
surrounding provinces.

Upgrading of old units into new ones is also done by a routine
slider bar, although naval units can't be upgraded. (However, the
attached air group to an aircraft carrier will upgrade, which is a
benefit anyway.)

In the research screen you assign a team, with some strengths,
to a project, which demands certain skills. The more matching strengths
the better: a research team with skill in electronics meets the
electronics needs twice as fast as one without. These strengths are
highlighted with little green boxes around the icon representing a
strength. You can trade with your allies for blueprints for technology,
which doesn't give you the technology but does double your research
speed for that particular development.

Hearts of Iron II Doomsday is an expansion package to Hearts of
Iron II and isn't by itself a separate game.


Victoria/Victoria Revolutions (an expansion pack) is the most
complicated but also perhaps the most rewarding. I'm going to need to
take a break and compose my thoughts to describe *that*.

But a neat twist I haven't made proper use of yet is that a
saved Victoria Revolutions game can be converted to and played in
Hearts of Iron II, which is how in one game I haven't really got figured
out yet an alternate Great War began with France at war with the United
States over who would dominate China.

--
Joseph Nebus
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