Making History II

[Philippe]

I finally got around to trying to play Making History II this weekend.

After taking a few stabs at Paraguay so I could play the Chaco War, I decided I had sort of figured out how the game works, so I started playing the U.S. in 1933.  What I wanted to see was whether or not the game lets you play as F.D.R. coaxing the country out of the Great Depression.

The strategic implications of the map are infectious, so it was all I could do to keep myself from fortifying the Canal Zone and building airfields on every convenient island.  I kept looking at Juneau and the Virgin Islands with lust in my constructor's eye.

But the problem was that most of the time there was no reason not to build all that stuff.

They jury is still out, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that the 1933 scenario is portraying a world mired in depression.

Most of the time I have more money than I know what to do with, and I usually have a manpower shortage.

In 1933, I would expect to have little or no money and more manpower than I would know what to do with (apart from the odd W.P.A. program).

Does this game actually model economies from the period, or am I just not playing it right?

It seems odd that every major power that I've looked at starts with exactly the same amount of money, though I realize that your amount of surplus cash never stays the same for long.

I can understand that harnessing raw materials and the means of production is in some ways more important than having access to money, which seems to have limited uses in the game. 

But you couldn't print money quite as easily back then as you can today because people still paid lip service to the barbaric relic, and what was really important, then as now, was access to credit.

Credit was often in short supply during the Great Depression, and I wonder if that is really being modeled.  Perhaps money in the game doesn't represent what I think it does.

If I don't understand how the game is supposed to work, I really wish someone would set me strait.  I always thought that Making History's strength was supposed to be its economic model.

I'm starting to wonder.

[bobarossa]

MHII has very little resemblance to actual history.  It's more a plaything/sandbox with a smattering of reality attached.  My experience is that AI doesn't know what to do.  It rarely expands on its resources which is necessary to survive a war where your access may be cut off.  However, I did enjoy playing with it (got it cheap).  Just don't expect reality. 

[Rayfer]

MHII has very little resemblance to actual history.  It's more a plaything/sandbox with a smattering of reality attached.  My experience is that AI doesn't know what to do.  It rarely expands on its resources which is necessary to survive a war where your access may be cut off.  However, I did enjoy playing with it (got it cheap).  Just don't expect reality.

I agree....I like both the WW1 and WW2 versions as bobarossa put it....plaything/sandbox games, not as historical simulations of those wars. They are both a lot of fun to explore all sorts of what if's....like invading Mexico as the USA and then expanding down into central and south America. It's not as easy as you might think.

[WallysWorld]

One thing that held me back from buying it during the sale was that they haven't implemented a difficulty slider yet as I thought I read recently. The difficulty is at 5 out of 10 and some users were complaining the game is too easy. The developers said they plan to implement the difficulty slider next patch.

Is that still the case of not being able to change the difficulty level to its highest level of 10?

[Philippe]

There is no slider.  There is, however, a drop-down menu with difficulties that you can set from one to ten.  I can't tell you what these difficulty levels do, but they don't seem to effect your starting resources.

[Boggit]

Everything Bobarossa said in his post is true. It would be nice if they had incorporated "events" at least to have created "historic" turning points that a player could choose to follow - or not.

[Jarhead0331]

Everything Bobarossa said in his post is true. It would be nice if they had incorporated "events" at least to have created "historic" turning points that a player could choose to follow - or not.

Then the game would be HOI.  >:D