Blog 5 - Memes

 Jonathan Sack

Blog 5 - Memes

 

     Considering most people probably have no idea what this is talking about, I will try to briefly explain the context as best I can. This is currently the top post of the r/hoi4 subreddit, which is dedicated to the World War II grand strategy game Hearts of Iron IV developed by Paradox Interactive. The general premise of the game is that you select a country in 1936 to control through 1948. The player controls many aspects of their country, including industry, politics, research, and decisions in crises. However, the most important aspect is producing and controlling their country's army, air force, and navy. The goal is essentially whatever the player decides, but the most common goal is to lead their respective faction (Axis, Allies) to victory in a mostly historical World War II. Another important piece of context to notice is that the meme is formatted after a Wikipedia infobox.

     Now that that's out of the way, I can talk about the meme itself, and its exigence. Again, the topic of the meme itself may be confusing to those who have never played the game. It is basically talking about how, when the player is not intervening, the Allies tend to go about their "D-Days" (players tend to refer to an invasion of German-controlled Europe by the Allies after the real life June 6th invasion). The AI is known for being...not the best. It struggles with the complexity of the game. Hoi4 runs slowly enough as it is, so Paradox has not put much emphasis on improving the AI.

     The exigence for this meme is essentially what it talks about - the AI has trouble executing naval invasions. When executed by a competent player, a naval invasion usually consists of air and naval supremacy, along with careful assaults by relatively small numbers of marines. A big priority is capturing a port so that the invading force can import supplies, such as food and ammunition. The AI... doesn't fully understand this concept. As the meme satirizes, the AI tends to invade with more troops than it can supply and without proper air support, dooming the invading force to starvation and ultimate defeat without hardly even fighting.

     However, perhaps the real driving force behind this is that the AI cannot learn. As the meme states, the UK and USA will sometimes invade the same spot, every other month, with the same disastrous consequences. A human player would perhaps make this mistake one or two times, and learn from it for later in that play-through, or perhaps the next play-through. The AI remains the same every game, only changing when Paradox updates it (which rarely happens to any large extent). This leads to frustration with the AI, especially when a country on the player's own side does this. It can feel like their ally threw away the game, not giving them a chance. 

In the end, the player that posted this decided to satirize the situation. They portray the AI's attempts as if it was real history, which shows just how ridiculous it really is. Perhaps this will draw more attention to this flaw of hoi4. It's 8 months old now, but perhaps it could even catch the eye of an employee at Paradox.