Editing Hearts of Iron (section)

==Hearts of Iron 1==
Virtually a footnote in Paradox and series history within just few years after release. The map is more or less EU's own, same with game engine, not that graphics mattered to the average Paradoxian. Played from 1936 to 1949, the faction with the highest victory points (meaning cities held with corresponding values by the faction members) wins when the timer hits new year of '50. Basic resources like coal, steel, oil and rubber are extracted daily and stockpiled, tradeable and exchangable. Mirroring real life, the Axis members need to find some rares and oil *fast*. The games were railroaded more or less, though some policy changes let the players change a few state properties if they kept grinding. Still, the hard-coded scripts kept happening, which became hilarious like a defeated democratic Japan before 1942 STILL re-enacting Pearl Harbor by default and declaring on the USA even when said US conquered her before 1942.

The original HoI introduced few lasting game mechanics and concepts that either stay to this day or defined the series for a looong time. First and foremost, WW2 ''must'' happen, it's hard-coded. Each country has Industrial Capacity (IC), which is an abstraction of its industrial and economic potential for the purpose of fueling the war machine. Manpower combined with IC allows to produce new units, at division-tier, with potential support battalions. Technology for military hardware has to be researched in an extensive tech tree. Resources have to be shipped from colonies/overseas territories. Part of the industrial capacity is by default tied by your civilians, who need basic goods or will start to protest against your regime. All units require ubiquitous supplies (which have to be continuously produced, tying part of IC, too) to fight efficiently and if they have any sort of motor-driven vehicles, also oil. And everything takes forever to build, so it's usually just plain easier to conquer someone and use their industry for your own military than try to build your own, while loss of few divisions can be a serious, often irreplaceable problem. Also, while nukes are eventually possible to deploy, they are strictly end-game stuff that requires copious technological investments that could be spend on more pressing matters.

The game as a whole was extremely bare-bone basics and even when compared with HoI2 feels like a tech demo of a high concept rather than an actual game. The most notable element from it is the way how research was concluded. Rather than having some sort of arbitrary decision about research slots, tech groups or whatever, each country could assign any given amount of its economy (represented by the size of useful IC) into research. This meant that Germany could start researching all the Wunderwaffe projects by mid-game, because it simply had half of Europe under its heel. And potentially any country that did enough conquering could simply tech up by the virtue of being simply rich, rather than having pre-defined research capacity. Also, each element had to be researched separately, often in co-related research, so deploying new tanks meant you had to develop new industrial technologies, new radios, new doctrines, new guns ''and'' various bits of the tank itself, all in separate technologies, to finally get access to the final result, rather than picking "Early War Medium Tank" technology and be done with it the moment research is finished. Ironically, the unique research system was dropped entirely from the series and never returned, replaced with much streamlined and pre-defined tech trees, where certain countries simply have better capacity to conduct research regardless of any factors, while you can forget about technological advances as anyone outside of the "big" nations.