| Darkest Hour: A Hearts of Iron Game | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Darkest Hour Team |
| Publisher(s) | Paradox Interactive |
| Engine | Europa Engine |
| Platform(s) | Microsoft Windows |
| Release date(s) | 5 April, 2011 [1] |
| Genre(s) | Real-time grand strategy |
| Mode(s) | Single-player, Multiplayer |
| System requirements
Pentium III with 800 MHz, 128 MB RAM, 1 GB of free hard drive space, 4 MB DirectX-compatible video card, DirectX-compatible sound card. |
|
Darkest Hour: A Hearts of Iron Game, or DH, is a grand strategy wargame that is based on Paradox Interactive's Europa engine. It is described as a 1914-1964 Grand Strategy Game and it allows the player to take control of and manage nearly any nation-state during the 1914-1964 timeframe including its political, diplomatic, espionage, economic, military, and technological aspects.
The game was released on 5 April, 2011. [2]
Contents |
Darkest Hour is, at its core, an evolution of Hearts of Iron 2 Armageddon.[3] This has been considered crucial by the development team to make it easy to port community-made modifications from HOI2 to DH.[3] Moreover, the most important changes to the engines have been added as mods to the core game, with the name "Darkest Hour Light" and "Darkest Hour Full"[3]:
Darkest Hour Full provides different grand campaign scenarios (where it is possible to choose any of the nations involved) or battlescenarios (focused on single theaters of operations, with only a few nations involved and playable).[3]
The scenarios are:
The player can build land divisions, aircraft wings, and naval ships/fleets, and combine these into corps and armies. The player also has the ability to control the appointment of military leaders of land, air and naval units as well as to control the appointment of individual government ministers and military commanders in key General Staff positions. The player can declare war, enforce embargoes, make alliances, claim and annex territories. The player can also alter the social and economic policies of their nation using sliders, such as democratic versus authoritarian, free market versus central planning and so on. Moving the sliders will result in different bonuses and penalties, allowing for a range of choices and strategies. Technological research is also controlled by the player. All this is on a global scale, with the player simultaneously dealing and interacting with nations across the world. The game can be paused at any point.
The game provides a launcher that allows the player to change its settings (like resolution, language, etc.) and eventually choose a mod to run on top of it.[3]
The 1.02 patch, released on November 11, 2011[4] added four new grand campaign scenarios and new functionalities (infantry units can now have two brigades and it is possible to upgrade a unit to a different model, for example a simple infantry unit can be upgraded to a motorized unit). The four new scenarios are:
It had been confirmed that many Mods designed for HOI2 Armageddon would also be converted to Darkest Hour. Most popular of these mods include Kaiserreich (alternative history where Central Powers won World War I), the Fallout Mod (set in the world of Fallout games), and Mod33 (rework of the game, beginning in 1933). Kaiserreich was released the same day as the game[5]. Mod33 was released on 27 August, 2011.
Note: As of 2 October, 2011 the TRP Mod, Kaiserreich, Road to Doomsday and Mod33 have been released for Darkest Hour.
Note: December 4th - The Fallout Mod (FoDD - Fallout DoomsDay) has been released (v 2.0.7) for the newest DH patch.
The Iron Cross expansion for HoI2 is also compatible with Darkest Hour.[6]
Darkest Hour was first announced on September 14, 2010 by Paradox Interactive.[7] The game became possible due to Paradox Interactive licensing the Europa engine to independent developers.[8]