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I believe they represent a nation's "natural tendency", in other words their preference, of drifting if left completely alone. Any of the other experts have another opinion on the matter?
They would drift +1.45 towards the Allies, +1.32 to the Axis and +0 to the Comintern.
Freues Neujahr aus Belgien
Danke gleichfalls
I am looking forward to the next part. With your help I will rule Europe ... someday
I have never paid much attention to those 2 numbers before, but I have had a good look at them tonight and I now think they indicate horizontal and vertical drift speed in the direction of the Axis corner.
Examples (from a January 1936 save I loaded):-
Xinjiang (-0.52/-0.04) is quite a long way to the left of the triangle and about half way down. It is shown as drifting 0.38 to Comintern, 0.24 to Allies and -0.36 to Axis, so it should be moving fairly quickly right-to-left (-0.52) and slowly bottom-to-top (-0.04) as the vertical push towards the Allies from the Axis logically outweighs the pull from Allies to Comintern.
Mexico (0.36/-1.13) is a little above and to the left of centre. It is drifting 1.23 towards the Allies, 0.04 towards the Axis and 0.00 towards Comintern, so almost all of its movement should be upwards (-1.13) but it also needs to move to the right a bit (0.36) to steer towards the top corner.
Yugoslavia (1.94/2.86) is over to the right and nearly half-way down. It is drifting 4.29 towards the Axis, 0.44 towards Comintern and 0.28 towards Allies. It must move fast down the triangle (2.86) whilst also moving some way to the right (1.94).
Any other suggestions?
I'd concur that is what they mean. You can test it by playing around with a save game file. Save a 1936 start and then edit the code for any country and look at where it appears.
Having played more than my fair share of USSR games, one thing I've noticed is that up to a point it doesn't matter too much if its the Comintern or the Axis influencing a nation - all it really affects is which 'wall' of the triangle it moves down. So if the Axis are influencing a nation away from the Allies, you can let it get half way down and then intervene to try and pull it your way (the reverse works as well).
Having played more than my fair share of USSR games, one thing I've noticed is that up to a point it doesn't matter too much if its the Comintern or the Axis influencing a nation - all it really affects is which 'wall' of the triangle it moves down. So if the Axis are influencing a nation away from the Allies, you can let it get half way down and then intervene to try and pull it your way (the reverse works as well).
right. they're just coordinates for the movement in the triangle. makes sense. so one is upwards (as a minus) or down (as a positive), while the other is the same for left and right.
In other words, for most uses largely useless, as the movement of the flag is much easier to track visually, IMO.
In other words, for most uses largely useless, as the movement of the flag is much easier to track visually, IMO.
Let me add one more thing as well. From what IIRC of the dev diaries, that triangle doesn't have to BE a triangle. It could be a square or whatever (through a mod). So since positioning on the screen is independent of the shape (except when it hits the boundaries of the shape), the system uses a simple coordinate system of X and Y. So the values of drift towards Allies, Comintern, and Axis are reduced through a formula to two variables, which as a side note possibly uses up some good amount of computational value each day.
If you intended to, you could mod such things like a pre-WWIII-scenario with the NATO and the Warsaw Pact, or a fantasy scenario with 4 or even more different factions.
Chapter 7: Politics.
Here is where we change ministers and laws, where we mobilize our armed forces in times of war, and, if we’re playing a democratic nation, where we worry about our party’s popularity.
Let’s look at the difficult stuff first. A political party has two game statistics: organisation and popularity, as illustrated by the graphics on the right.
Organisation is political cloud. The higher party organisation, the more it is capable of influencing the political landscape.
Popularity is simply how popular the party is with the people. Election results are based on popularity.
The game uses some formula or other to translate organisation into popularity, which it does at the beginning of each month, as far as I know. In SF, this is as far as it gets. In FtM, however, things are a bit different.
For FtM, each 10% popularity gives a party the right for 1 seat in the cabinet. If it doesn’t get those seats, there will be a “fractured government”, which will cost us National Unity. The only way to counter this, is by using home spies to either raise NU or support the ruling party, modifying the party’s organisation, and, thereby, its Popularity. This is how the spy mission ‘support our party” works abroad as well. By changing our party’s org, we hope to change its pop.
There is one spy mission I haven’t talked about before, because I wanted to illustrate this mechanic first. In FtM only, there is now the chance for a coup. We can organise a coup in any nation where there is a strong fascist opposition, with a base chance of 10% per eligible government seat. In other words, if the UK’s NS party is eligible for 3 seats in the government, there is a 30% chance for a succesfull coup. This will eliminate all spies in the target nation, however, so make sure you have plenty of replacements first. There are probably other factors at work that I don’t know about, but that is the basic game mechanic. I have never seen the AI use this on other nations, though, but better safe than sorry.
Fortunately, in Germany, as long as we have Hitler as head of State (I think he’s responsible), we are immune to the NU hit other nations take for a fractured government.
Directly below these graphs, there is a section on Strategic Warfare.
The first one, the boat, represents our convoys getting hit. If we loose a lot of those, our NU will take a dive. However, if we manage to intercept the raiders, we show to the people that we are in control of the situation. With enough interceptions, we will actually start to see a rise of our NU. Fortunately for us, Germany doesn’t need convoys once the war starts until after we’ve dealt with the SU and are ready to invade the UK. This is the reason why I don’t envision an invasion of Norway: with our focus on submarine warfare, the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet would have our convoys for breakfast, along with our NU. If this were an ahistorical AAR, we could invade Sweden first, as supplies could then travel across the Danish Strait from Copenhagen to Malmö. We could then invade Norway by land without ever needing a single convoy. But this is an historic path, and we’ll stick to our resolve.
The second strategic warfare icon represents war Fatigue. After concluding a war, this represents the people's unwillingness to get involved in another one any time soon (according to the manual; this was never implemented correctly, apparently)
The third one, however, will get our full attention. These are Strategic Bombing runs by our enemies. As with convoys, we will suffer NU for unpunished bombings, but get a bonus for engaging them with our interceptors.
Lastly we can mobilize our troops in preparation for war, liberate allied nations or create puppets: these are nations, nominally independent, whose government has been chosen by us. They will pay for their limited independence with suplus resources. We will not get any IC or MP or LS from them, but on the plus side, we won’t have to police them against partisans.
Now the left-hand side.
At the top, we have our form of government and the time plus the date until the next election. As Germany, our form of government is “national socialism”, and as a totalitarian regime, we don’t have any elections.
Next up are the ministers in our cabinet. These can be changed at will. Players coming from HOI2, please note that there is no longer a dissent hit for doing so. The danger, in FtM only, would be the risk of a fractured government leading to the risk of a coup and lost NU.
We are going to change some ministers to better suit our needs. Find the armaments minister about halfway in the first column. Click replace.
Scrolling through the list will give us a couple of interesting ministers. Göring would give us a decrease in light aircraft practical decay (more on this in the next lesson on research), Schacht would give us an increase in IC, and Franz Xavier-Schwarz gives us an increase in resources. Who to choose depends completely on the needs and chosen strategy for Germany.
Göring’s main advantage can be duplicated, in a way, simply by building enough light aircrafts (bear with me on this one). In SF and HOI2, I always went for Schacht and never felt the need to change him later. In FtM, however, things become a bit more subtle. There are far less resources in general to trade. As stated in the lesson on resources, more IC means more resource consumption. The more IC we conquer, the more explicit Schacht’s advantage will take center stage in Germany’s Number 1 Problem: not enough metal and not enough rare. In that light, and since Germany already has one of the strongest industries in the world, I will go for Schwarz as armaments minister. Coupled with loads of trade, he will help ensure that by 1939 we have the surplus to last us several years.
So click on “select” next to Schwarz.
Minister of Security is next. There really is only one choice here: dr. Goebbels, who will enhance our LS by 5%, which will feed our spy training, NCO training, diplomacy points and research. Select him.
Head of Intelligence: here we will choose Frick over Canaris to get a 5% bonus to espionage. Coupled with Hitler’s own 5% espionage bonus this becomes a 10% bonus in all spymatters!
Chief of Staff: We could replace Beck with Bayerlein here. Beck gives us 10% combat movement bonus (in layman’s terms this means that, after succesfully attacking a province, our troops will occupy the target province 10% faster). Bayerlein gives us 10% bonus on supply throughput (each province will be able to send/receive 10% more supplies, making our supply net a lot smoother). Again, its a matter of strategy. Until after the fall of France, we won’t really need the extra throughput. What’s more, I feel that, especially the western Campaign requires speed over supplies to prevent the French from counterattacking and making us fight over the same province twice. So we will keep Beck around until we can visit Paris.
Chief of the Army: Von Blomberg gives us a 10% reduction in supply consumption, which translates into quite a lot of freed-up IC over the next 3 years. Select him to head our land forces.
The rest can stay as they are. As you can see, the strategic path we chose as our first step in my introduction dictates a lot of our later choices.
This is what your political tab should look like when we’re done. If anything is different, change it. SF players might exchange Schacht over Schwarz without many problems (more IC, less resources)
In the left bottom corner we find our laws. Again, mousing over each law will give us the effect the current law is giving us. We could (and will) change some laws if we had the money to spare, simply by clicking on the current law and choosing another highlighted one.
The laws are divided as follows:
Civil Laws: these govern how much individual freedom we allow for the inhabitants of Germany. Stricter laws will provide counterintelligence bonuses as well as a reduction of Consumer Goods needed during wartime.
Conscription Laws: Increase our MP and officer ratio at the cost of making reserve divisions more expensive.
Economic Laws: Provide a bonus to IC and resources while decreasing Consumer Goods needs during wartime, in exchange for a rather steep monetary cost.
Education laws: more leadership, less money.
Industrial laws: An exception to the rule that laws lower on the list are better, this one has 3 possibilities:
*)Consumer Product orientation: provides a reduction of CG needs that, for Majors, can be quite substantial, in exchange for 5% slower and more expensive production. Choose this one during peacetime if you’re not expecting to go to war any time soon.
*)Mixed industry: the one all nations start with by default (even the ones who aren’t eligible for it), this provides a modest reduction of CG needs both at peace and at war while providing a 5% supply throughput bonus (if you don’t remember what that is, check above when I discussed Chief of Staff). If you’re expecting an invasion within the next year or so, this is the one to choose.
*) Heavy Industry: the increased supply throughput and production bonus make this the law to use when at war (note that Communist governments are the only ones who can choose this law while at peace).
Press laws: propaganda press provides us with a bonus on counterespionage and a reduction of NU changes, making it the ideal choice for Germany.
Training laws: production of units will take longer, but our divisions will be much more effective in combat.
There is one last section that concerns our occupation “laws” (just how much will we exploit occupied nations?), but since there aren’t any just yet, I’ll get back to this once Poland has been subdued in 1939.
That’s about it, I guess. Next chapter: Leadership and research! See you then!
Here is where we change ministers and laws, where we mobilize our armed forces in times of war, and, if we’re playing a democratic nation, where we worry about our party’s popularity.
Let’s look at the difficult stuff first. A political party has two game statistics: organisation and popularity, as illustrated by the graphics on the right.
Organisation is political cloud. The higher party organisation, the more it is capable of influencing the political landscape.
Popularity is simply how popular the party is with the people. Election results are based on popularity.
The game uses some formula or other to translate organisation into popularity, which it does at the beginning of each month, as far as I know. In SF, this is as far as it gets. In FtM, however, things are a bit different.
For FtM, each 10% popularity gives a party the right for 1 seat in the cabinet. If it doesn’t get those seats, there will be a “fractured government”, which will cost us National Unity. The only way to counter this, is by using home spies to either raise NU or support the ruling party, modifying the party’s organisation, and, thereby, its Popularity. This is how the spy mission ‘support our party” works abroad as well. By changing our party’s org, we hope to change its pop.
There is one spy mission I haven’t talked about before, because I wanted to illustrate this mechanic first. In FtM only, there is now the chance for a coup. We can organise a coup in any nation where there is a strong fascist opposition, with a base chance of 10% per eligible government seat. In other words, if the UK’s NS party is eligible for 3 seats in the government, there is a 30% chance for a succesfull coup. This will eliminate all spies in the target nation, however, so make sure you have plenty of replacements first. There are probably other factors at work that I don’t know about, but that is the basic game mechanic. I have never seen the AI use this on other nations, though, but better safe than sorry.
Fortunately, in Germany, as long as we have Hitler as head of State (I think he’s responsible), we are immune to the NU hit other nations take for a fractured government.
Directly below these graphs, there is a section on Strategic Warfare.
The first one, the boat, represents our convoys getting hit. If we loose a lot of those, our NU will take a dive. However, if we manage to intercept the raiders, we show to the people that we are in control of the situation. With enough interceptions, we will actually start to see a rise of our NU. Fortunately for us, Germany doesn’t need convoys once the war starts until after we’ve dealt with the SU and are ready to invade the UK. This is the reason why I don’t envision an invasion of Norway: with our focus on submarine warfare, the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet would have our convoys for breakfast, along with our NU. If this were an ahistorical AAR, we could invade Sweden first, as supplies could then travel across the Danish Strait from Copenhagen to Malmö. We could then invade Norway by land without ever needing a single convoy. But this is an historic path, and we’ll stick to our resolve.
The second strategic warfare icon represents war Fatigue. After concluding a war, this represents the people's unwillingness to get involved in another one any time soon (according to the manual; this was never implemented correctly, apparently)
The third one, however, will get our full attention. These are Strategic Bombing runs by our enemies. As with convoys, we will suffer NU for unpunished bombings, but get a bonus for engaging them with our interceptors.
Lastly we can mobilize our troops in preparation for war, liberate allied nations or create puppets: these are nations, nominally independent, whose government has been chosen by us. They will pay for their limited independence with suplus resources. We will not get any IC or MP or LS from them, but on the plus side, we won’t have to police them against partisans.
Now the left-hand side.
At the top, we have our form of government and the time plus the date until the next election. As Germany, our form of government is “national socialism”, and as a totalitarian regime, we don’t have any elections.
Next up are the ministers in our cabinet. These can be changed at will. Players coming from HOI2, please note that there is no longer a dissent hit for doing so. The danger, in FtM only, would be the risk of a fractured government leading to the risk of a coup and lost NU.
We are going to change some ministers to better suit our needs. Find the armaments minister about halfway in the first column. Click replace.
Scrolling through the list will give us a couple of interesting ministers. Göring would give us a decrease in light aircraft practical decay (more on this in the next lesson on research), Schacht would give us an increase in IC, and Franz Xavier-Schwarz gives us an increase in resources. Who to choose depends completely on the needs and chosen strategy for Germany.
Göring’s main advantage can be duplicated, in a way, simply by building enough light aircrafts (bear with me on this one). In SF and HOI2, I always went for Schacht and never felt the need to change him later. In FtM, however, things become a bit more subtle. There are far less resources in general to trade. As stated in the lesson on resources, more IC means more resource consumption. The more IC we conquer, the more explicit Schacht’s advantage will take center stage in Germany’s Number 1 Problem: not enough metal and not enough rare. In that light, and since Germany already has one of the strongest industries in the world, I will go for Schwarz as armaments minister. Coupled with loads of trade, he will help ensure that by 1939 we have the surplus to last us several years.
So click on “select” next to Schwarz.
Minister of Security is next. There really is only one choice here: dr. Goebbels, who will enhance our LS by 5%, which will feed our spy training, NCO training, diplomacy points and research. Select him.
Head of Intelligence: here we will choose Frick over Canaris to get a 5% bonus to espionage. Coupled with Hitler’s own 5% espionage bonus this becomes a 10% bonus in all spymatters!
Chief of Staff: We could replace Beck with Bayerlein here. Beck gives us 10% combat movement bonus (in layman’s terms this means that, after succesfully attacking a province, our troops will occupy the target province 10% faster). Bayerlein gives us 10% bonus on supply throughput (each province will be able to send/receive 10% more supplies, making our supply net a lot smoother). Again, its a matter of strategy. Until after the fall of France, we won’t really need the extra throughput. What’s more, I feel that, especially the western Campaign requires speed over supplies to prevent the French from counterattacking and making us fight over the same province twice. So we will keep Beck around until we can visit Paris.
Chief of the Army: Von Blomberg gives us a 10% reduction in supply consumption, which translates into quite a lot of freed-up IC over the next 3 years. Select him to head our land forces.
The rest can stay as they are. As you can see, the strategic path we chose as our first step in my introduction dictates a lot of our later choices.
This is what your political tab should look like when we’re done. If anything is different, change it. SF players might exchange Schacht over Schwarz without many problems (more IC, less resources)
In the left bottom corner we find our laws. Again, mousing over each law will give us the effect the current law is giving us. We could (and will) change some laws if we had the money to spare, simply by clicking on the current law and choosing another highlighted one.
The laws are divided as follows:
Civil Laws: these govern how much individual freedom we allow for the inhabitants of Germany. Stricter laws will provide counterintelligence bonuses as well as a reduction of Consumer Goods needed during wartime.
Conscription Laws: Increase our MP and officer ratio at the cost of making reserve divisions more expensive.
Economic Laws: Provide a bonus to IC and resources while decreasing Consumer Goods needs during wartime, in exchange for a rather steep monetary cost.
Education laws: more leadership, less money.
Industrial laws: An exception to the rule that laws lower on the list are better, this one has 3 possibilities:
*)Consumer Product orientation: provides a reduction of CG needs that, for Majors, can be quite substantial, in exchange for 5% slower and more expensive production. Choose this one during peacetime if you’re not expecting to go to war any time soon.
*)Mixed industry: the one all nations start with by default (even the ones who aren’t eligible for it), this provides a modest reduction of CG needs both at peace and at war while providing a 5% supply throughput bonus (if you don’t remember what that is, check above when I discussed Chief of Staff). If you’re expecting an invasion within the next year or so, this is the one to choose.
*) Heavy Industry: the increased supply throughput and production bonus make this the law to use when at war (note that Communist governments are the only ones who can choose this law while at peace).
Press laws: propaganda press provides us with a bonus on counterespionage and a reduction of NU changes, making it the ideal choice for Germany.
Training laws: production of units will take longer, but our divisions will be much more effective in combat.
There is one last section that concerns our occupation “laws” (just how much will we exploit occupied nations?), but since there aren’t any just yet, I’ll get back to this once Poland has been subdued in 1939.
That’s about it, I guess. Next chapter: Leadership and research! See you then!
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in vanila HOI (ie the manual) war fatigue was meant to affect what happened if you went back to war. The mechanic was something like being a barrier to a democracy and creating dissent in a more authotarian regime. I'd guess it was designed with a transition to WW3 in mind but I've never seen it have any effect.
One wee quibble on heavy industry/full mobilisation. In FTM unless a German player is very careful with stockpiles etc, those 2 in combination can make you run out of resources by about 1942. So picking them too early can set up a nasty situation in the middle of trying to deal with the Soviets, pick them too late and your army is going to be too small. Its a nice dilemna, but I'm not sure as Germany I'd immediately pick them when war with Poland starts.
Again a really good oversight of some key stuff that is all too easy to overlook. It maybe an idea (apols suggesting more work for you) to do that post again from the perspective of France. Reason to suggest this is I think of the majors France is the most constrained by its political/economic stance in 1936 so it rather neatly shows up just what are the consequences of being stuck with the wrong laws?
One wee quibble on heavy industry/full mobilisation. In FTM unless a German player is very careful with stockpiles etc, those 2 in combination can make you run out of resources by about 1942. So picking them too early can set up a nasty situation in the middle of trying to deal with the Soviets, pick them too late and your army is going to be too small. Its a nice dilemna, but I'm not sure as Germany I'd immediately pick them when war with Poland starts.
Again a really good oversight of some key stuff that is all too easy to overlook. It maybe an idea (apols suggesting more work for you) to do that post again from the perspective of France. Reason to suggest this is I think of the majors France is the most constrained by its political/economic stance in 1936 so it rather neatly shows up just what are the consequences of being stuck with the wrong laws?
Thanks for a great thread! I've a question concerning the political screen that I haven't been able to find an answer for anywhere. How much does the political affiliation of a minister matter for the popularity and organisation of the ruling party?
thanks for the suggestion. I might do that.
re: laws. Right now I'm only talking in broad terms on what would be the ideal situation. Since I have a couple of SF readers, things change for them quite a lot here. you're right, of course. Germany can't afford to fully gear up for war. they would run out, just like they did by 1945, about 2 years after Goebbels' "Total War" speech.
To be honest, I don't know exactly how the game mechanic works, here. Organisation seems to rise and fall according to hidden modifiers. the game only informs us like this: "+1.42 for internal blablabla", but never actually states those internal circumstances. I assume that giving ministers of a "mere" fascist" ideology more posts would increase their organisation. I only know what to do about it, but both solutions require time to come to fruition.
I think you should change that point a bit. It could cause some (huge?) misunderstanding with the Attack Delay concept, which this minister trait won't affect.
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I can see where you're going with this, but since attack delay only sets in when your troops have occupied the target province, it sets in 10% faster and finishes 10% faster. Besides, I haven't even begun explaining divisions yet, let alone break down combat. don't worry, it'll all be clear before we go to war.