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Johan

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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.
alpha_okt22.jpg
 
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Wow, this looks great!

So you have finally found a way to solve the "instant fleet parity after Barbarossa" Problem without using specialized IC! Congratulations!

Even more so, you have also found a way to make research in specific areas more dependant on actual usage without the "research team as CK caracters" approach! Again, Congratulations on this!

This looks really good to me, I'm eager to learn more about the build layout (AA/Forts/... in provinces or regions?) and the logistical system, glad you mentioned the latter as your special emphasis!

Kudos to the dev-team! :)
 
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I hope there will be some more focus on the shape of provinces. I'm getting worried, since at the moment they all (except for those that are near the coast) seem to be of the same shape, with a small number of ugly straight lines on every province.
 
Samilou said:
I hope there will be some more focus on the shape of provinces. I'm getting worried, at the moment they all (except for those that are near the coast) seem to be of the same shape, with ugly straight lines all over.

They don't seem that bad in my eyes, though. :confused:
 
Samilou said:
I hope there will be some more focus on the shape of provinces. I'm getting worried, since at the moment they all (except for those that are near the coast) seem to be of the same shape, with a small number of ugly straight lines on every province.

Those are quite all right IMO.

I still don't like the national borders. There have to be an more definite feeling of the borders between nations I believe.
 
Johan said:
That's true you have done a great job on Southeastern England, so maybe not "all" provinces are blandly shaped when I think of it. The thing is you will have to do that to all provinces on the map to make it a pleasant map to look at for 4-8 hours a day for 5 or so years into the future. This is still far from the beautiful provinces in older Paradoxgames, but hopefully it will get there in the end, sadly it will take a lot more work to make 10000 provinces that beautiful.
 
This sounds quite promising. It'll be interesting to see how the production and research systems work together. I hope we'll be able to modify any relevant values, of course.
 
IC based is ok for me.

I'm a little bit disappointed about the fact (as it seems) that you can still mix up air - naval - army production in % from 100-0-0 to 0-30-70 for example in short time. :(

I would prefer a splitted production for air, army and naval (shipyards) maybe with a slider, where you can allocate your needed percentage (Changing 10% could last 30days...)
 
Cpack said:
I'm a little bit disappointed about the fact (as it seems) that you can still mix up air - naval - army production in % from 100-0-0 to 0-30-70 for example in short time. :(

I would prefer a splitted production for air, army and naval (shipyards) maybe with a slider, where you can allocate your needed percentage (Changing 10% could last 30days...)

Please read http://www.europa-universalis.com/forum/showthread.php?t=379317 it explains clearly how this is no longer an issue.
 
Samilou said:
That's true you have done a great job on Southeastern England, so maybe not "all" provinces are blandly shaped when I think of it. The thing is you will have to do that to all provinces on the map to make it a pleasant map to look at for 4-8 hours a day for 5 or so years into the future. This is still far from the beautiful provinces in older Paradoxgames, but hopefully it will get there in the end, sadly it will take a lot more work to make 10000 provinces that beautiful.

#1 - provinces are supposed to be "similarly shaped" for proper strategies, as explained in the link I gave you.

#2 - I don't see how southeastern england is a great job and northwestern germany is crap looking. After all, they are "similarly sized" provinces on both maps.
 
I notice the definition of coastline is sharper than the definition of in-land border (straight lines).
Is there some kind of random algorithm to draw coast lines?
 
Johan said:
Please read http://www.europa-universalis.com/forum/showthread.php?t=379317 it explains clearly how this is no longer an issue.

Hmm, maybe I don't get it. I see, that there're restrictions and penalties in jumping back and forth, but as I understand it, its still possible to go extreme.

F.e if I have 500 IC for production, I can still start building army units for 500 IC and later switch to 500 IC navy (with severe penalties)

So there're no limits or rules of having 150 IC for navy, 100 IC for Air and 250 for army which I can change over time.

But I'll see in further screenies and diaries how it will look like :)
 
Doomtrader said:
As I can understand building tanks in shipyards, I can't imaging (without mass production superbed in organization and modular construction) making ships in inland factories.
Of course I'm not saying I don't like it.

Build artillery, radar, ammuntion etc inland. Send it to the skipyards and place it on the hull? Dont think everything on a ship is being build on the shipyard.
 
Cpack said:
Hmm, maybe I don't get it. I see, that there're restrictions and penalties in jumping back and forth, but as I understand it, its still possible to go extreme.

F.e if I have 500 IC for production, I can still start building army units for 500 IC and later switch to 500 IC navy (with severe penalties)

So there're no limits or rules of having 150 IC for navy, 100 IC for Air and 250 for army which I can change over time.

But I'll see in further screenies and diaries how it will look like :)

Yes you are spot on, instead of forcing people to do something we instead offer up rewards for doing something. So if you balance your IC spending you will get more efficient production and research across the board.