The years between 19 certainly were tumultuous and are of great historical interest, but I was disappointed to find that there weren't any scenarios offering greater stretches of time, allowing for even more alternate histories. That said, one problem I have with the time scale is the rather narrow historical window the game plays in.

By coordinating attacks, you can time it so different forces from different provinces - armor and infantry, air units and motorized troops - all hit the enemy at the same time, thus letting you concentrate your firepower in one area. For example, travel from one province to another depends on the speed of the units making the trip and the type of terrain that has to be crossed. This means it's now possible to coordinate the attacks of multiple units precisely. Whereas in EU you're dealing with days, months, years, and even decades and centuries, the smallest unit here is the hour, which is much more appropriate for modern warfare. Also important is the time scale of the game. I don't think leaders can die by chance in combat it's never happened to me, although I did notice a bug wherein some of the generic leaders (in this case, my Italian air force commanders) dismissed to the officer pool sometimes wouldn't reappear, wasting valuable experience points. A nice touch is that many of the leader units have historical pictures that help individuate them, and they also have specialties - Rommel is a 'Trickster' who gets surprise and camouflage bonuses, while Zhukov is a tank leader, best suited to leading the Red Army's armored formations. Individual units do not gain experience but their leaders do, and it behooves you to constantly put your best leaders in the thick of the fighting to maximize use of their bonuses, as well as give them even more experience and superior skill. I was also disappointed by the inability to rename your divisions, corps, and armies so that they're easier to keep track of - an oversight common to all the EU-engine games. This is a bizarre and unfortunate design decision. Unfortunately the designers chose to name the provinces after the major city in each area, which is fine for obvious locales like Paris or Berlin but trying to find 'lost' armies by means of the obscure and forgotten colony names in the heart of Africa, for example, is quite a chore, and no American would ever refer to our states by their capital cities, most of which we can't even name.

state (although the scale varies from place to place around the world - smaller for densely populated areas, to quite large for undeveloped wilderness). The smallest ground unit is the division, and the basic geographic unit is a province, a region of land roughly equal to a typical U.S. The results of individual battles are determined by chance, as well as the quality, composition, morale, leadership, and numbers of the units you've thrown into the fray. But in terms of your combat decision-making, your role is to produce as many technologically sophisticated units as you can, as quickly as you can, and maneuver them into position so they can deliver as much damage as possible. Strategy on a grand scale Hearts of Iron isn't by any means a tactical game, it's strategy on a grand scale, closer to Axis & Allies than Squad Leader, although in terms of complexity it's more like the latter. And now that I've been playing the game non-stop for the last couple weeks, I can say that Hearts of Iron, while having some notable drawbacks, is a solid addition to the EU line and the Paradox name. So when I heard the same developers were making a World War II-based game using a modified version of the EU engine, I was quite intrigued.

Will there ba a hearts of iron 5