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A Preview of Making History II: The War of the World

In addition to getting to meet with people from Puzzle Quest 2 and Two Worlds II at PAX East 2010, the Convention Fans Blog/Alltern8.com team also got to take a look at Making History II, published by Muzzy Lane Software.

Making History II: The War of the World is a grand strategy game set against the backdrop of World War II, allowing players to start their games in 1933, 1936, or 1939. It features a staggering 180 playable nationalities. In order to get a better idea of what players can expect, we sat down at chatted with Chris Parsons, who is the Product Manager for Muzzy Lane Software. He took us through the menus, showed us some really cool features, and spoke at length on the game's inspired multiplayer capability (an aspect of the game that really impressed us!).

On Removing "Walls of Text" and the Need for Spread Sheets...

"The concept we have is to try and remove a lot of the walls of text and reams of spread sheets that you typically get for these [grand strategy] games, and just remain on the map, let the players see the map all the time. The idea is to make it very easy to determine what's going on, what state you're in. We've organized the game around four basic areas: units (which are all the military units themselves), cities (which are where your production and your research take place), regions (where you're regional upgrades, transportation, infrastructure, defense, etc. are), and nations (where all your international diplomacy takes place, where your economy's managed from). Although the economy is also going to [be a] factor in the regions. You'll get certain amounts of stuff from each region."

On Invading Other Countries...

"One of the unique things we've done in our game, which is, when you play grand strategy games you come [and] you invade someplace, you take over and often times that's it. But realistically, what happens when you take over other nations is it's much more complex. We have puppet states, we have [the ability] to create colonies, you can grant full independence to nations too. What it comes down to is the more control that you maintain, the more potential instability."

"We have something called national stability, where your nation has a stability rating based on the demographic of your citizens. So if you have a fairly homogeneous nation, you're going to be fairly stable. But if [France] has something like the Balkans, with all the different mixtures, not so much. There's a great [map] overlay for that too. [...] So if you're Germany and you take over Austria, there's a really excellent chance that you're not going to get a lot of trouble from them. They are very similar in every way. But if you're taking over the Balkans, you're going to have a lot of trouble. So you may want to think about them on a region by region basis, making some of them puppet states, or making some of them colonies instead of just annexing them. And that will reduce the chance of coups. The other half of that, is that you as the player can instigate coups in other places with espionage. So if I'm playing Germany and I take this area over, you can start funding the opposition movement in these areas to get them to rebel against me, which would cause me to spend more of my time and troops there instead of attacking you. It's very much a real world model."