If you keep up with what Paradox talk about you may be aware that they just recently announced a new project, first codenamed Project Reagan and since revealed to be a Cold War-era game by the team who made HoI2 offshoot Arsenal of Democracy. Now, as long-time readers may be aware I have a particular interest in the Cold War or more specifically the aspect of nuclear warfare and policy within it. To this end I’m going to write up a nice long post detailing my thoughts on this development!

At the core of the Cold War, and thus things that need to be executed well in this game, are two concepts. The first is the whole espionage, diplomacy, proxy war side of things. The second is nuclear policy, strategy, brinkmanship, and potentially, war. Neither of these are things that have been tremendously well-implemented in the main so it will be interesting to see whether the AoD team can live up to this challenge.

If the consequences of nukes are only “GAME OVER, and no you don’t get an animation of a mushroom cloud, we don’t reward failure.” then it’s not actually going to be very much fun. It was a valid design choice for Balance of Power, but I’ve got both academic and gamer objections to the idea of ending the game the moment someone presses the red button. Just because nuclear brinkmanship worked out the way it did in our world does not mean it always had to do so, and this needs to be reflected if the game is going to be anything except a history show.

The problem (And this is something that Pox as well as other games always fall down on) is that you really need to model negotiations, both formal ones like the SALT talks and “Comrade Premier, there’s a single American nuclear weapon flying in. It will detonate in the remote Urals. What do we do?” red-phone hotline business. There needs to be the opportunity for deceit – there needs to be the opportunity for back-and-forth – and there needs to be an intensely personal element to it. When you talk to the President about said incoming nuke it matters enormously what you, as the Russian Premier, think of him. If the two of you have good relations and you believe him sufficiently honest, that’s going to demand a much different reaction from thinking he’s a gung-ho senile old capitalist snake who has been itching to wipe out Moscow. As it stands of course the system is Send an Offer -> Other Guys reject it -> Two weeks later bribe Other Guys -> Two weeks later Send the Offer again. That barely cuts it for any of their existing games, it sure as shit won’t cut it in a conflict which should very often play out without full-scale war and where the outbreak of full-scale war itself should provide a massive imperative for emergency negotiations to stop it, because everyone knows where it could very quickly lead.

The question of nuclear targeting policy, and nuclear use policy, is of vital importance. In real history the USA’s policy was to keep European forces relatively weak, weak enough that they couldn’t really hope to stop a full-scale Soviet invasion (this changed as time passed and NATO technology developed much faster than Soviet tech did, and by the 80’s this would have just led to a lot of ruined Red tanks). They also made explicit that they would not rule out first-use of nuclear weapons. The whole thing was a bluff, brinkmanship of the highest order. Perception is more important than knowledge, and your leader’s personal beliefs on the Other Guys is vital. Another issue in the targeting policy side of things is that targeting policy occupied a huge amount of thought on both side. What do you aim at? How much do you devote towards everything? Is your policy to try and wipe out the other guy’s ability to nuke you? To simply ensure your own second-strike capability, so even if every last person in Russia is dead you can still destroy the West? Do you target population centers, or only warfighting centers, and does the distinction even matter? So on and so forth, and nothing about the outcome was predetermined, of course.

It will be interesting to see how East vs. West tackles these issues, if indeed it tries to at all. It’s been a long time since there was a real Cold War game, and longer still since one that took a shot at tackling these sorts of issues. A good Cold War game could be the most tense gameplay experience since the original Silent Hill made us shit our britches. We’ll have to wait and see.

(PS for one view on what nuclear policy should be, you could do worse than to read Colin Gray’s paper Victory is Possible.)