Hello and welcome to the second development diary for Hearts of Iron 3. It has been a busy week in the development team, with people working on historical decisions and event chains, developing the production interface, and doing work on the political and diplomatical parts of the game. Now it is wednesday again, and as the tradition goes, its a Vindaloo for lunch and then a development diary to write.
This week, I am going to talk about the production system, which is the core of the economics in HoI3. Hearts of Iron is a game focused on re-figthing WW2, where economy matters, but is not the main focus of the game. When we increase complexity in HoI3, it will primarily be at the warfare and logistics part of the game. We are keeping the IC system that was so successful in the previous incarnations of the series, where you decide what you want to produce centrally, and allocate IC on consumer goods, supplies, upgrades, reinforcement and production.
However, some aspects have changed, for what we think will create a much more realistic and balanced gameplay.
First up, we've added efficency as a concept for resource extraction, and for the output of resources per IC. This will create strategic possibilites of improving your industry in certain aspects.
However perhaps the biggest change is to gearing. Rather than having you stick on long production queues that become more efficient over time, a country has a number of practical values representing its accumulated experience in producing certain types of equipment. These decay over time, so to keep yourself up to date you need to keep continually producing equipment of this type. Now a rather interesting consequence of this rule is that let’s say you are Germany, you have focussed all out on land and air units and you have conquered Russia so now you are going to sink all your IC into building ships. You’re production will be initially be much less efficient until your economy reorients towards naval production.
Another interesting thing is that production effects technology, the more of something you produce the easier it is to research in that area. So if you want to advance technology in an area (say carriers) you are going to want to keep producing carriers to pick up the research bonus. Yes no more tech rushing, those early model carriers may not be that good but they will serve as a nice test bed for design ideas.
We're not entirely ready to show the production interface, but here is a screenshot of northwestern germany, where you can see how detailed in amount of provinces the map is becoming.
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Originally Posted by Doomtrader
