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Johan

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Hello, and welcome back to the weekly HoI3 development diary.

It has been another week of interesting development at the project, and we continued with development of the core of politics, diplomacy and logistics. The interfaces is starting to come together, and we hope to soon be able to show you some of them.

Rather evilly we left you with a bit of cliffhanger last week, the answer to the question how do you do research? This week we introduce the concept of leadership; this represent educated people who live in your country. They are used for research, diplomacy, espionage and your officer corps.

Before going into more detail let’s talk a little about our philosophy. It all comes down to what we feel makes for good strategy. Strategy demands clear-cut long-term choices. Our goal is that you the player should be weighing up your options carefully and not just be reacting to short term considerations. If you want to go all out on research you should be able to do so, however as with real life there should also be a price to pay.

In later developer diaries you will hear more about diplomacy and espionage and how we plan to achieve our goal of making you plan your investment in these areas for the long term. At the moment we will say that the amount of leadership points invested in these areas acts as a cap on how much you can do. The focus of this dev diary will be party on technology and partly on officers.

As mentioned at the top of diary leadership is your educated people. These aren’t just the top the university graduates, in fact it is the exact opposite. If we look at the Manhattan project there were over 130,000 people working on it and not all of these went onto to win a Nobel Prize for Physics. All research projects in our time frame relied on these support people to make them happen, and this is Leadership. The top graduates are represented by your nations accumulated theory value and can only give you benefits for projects where their skills apply, while the clerks, secretaries, draftsmen, chemists, physics etc. who are the unsung heroes of wartime research, they can work anywhere.

In order to make our task of game balance easier these leadership points are consumed when you do research. We do acknowledge that the people you assign to projects will become steadily more experienced and don’t just disappear and this is also held as your accumulated theory value. The more you research in an area the less leadership points you will need to advance in a field. Similarly for practical values, having a number of tanks to work with already means you need to expend less effort to advance in a field.

I also mention the officer corps, to put your minds at rest the divisional level and above leaders you had in Hearts of Iron and Hearts of Iron 2 are still there. These represent the Officers and NCOs below divisional rank. These are the men supplied the glue that held your divisions together. As you invest more in leadership your divisions can take more punishment. Taking casualties, building more troops, plus the occasional officer purge will mean your units will fall apart more easily in combat.

I mentioned earlier that I would explain what the little flag at the top of the screen is for. Well, as you now most likely have guessed, its the indicator of your leadership.

Now, for today we have two screenshots.. in the first one there is a zoomed out view of northern italy in the political layer. You can clearly see the region borders, as well as province borders here. We assume that this will be about the most common zooming level you'll give orders to your troops in.
alpha_nov5a.jpg


Here is a zoomed in detail level of northwestern italy in pure-terrain mode with no layers.
alpha_nov5b.jpg


Another little aspect of the map.. If you play in "counters-mode".. the camera is locked in full 2d and will not tilt for more dramatic 3d looks.
 
Johan said:
Taking casualties, building more troops, plus the occasional officer purge will mean your units will fall apart more easily in combat.

If you may clarify a bit more Johan please. Does this mean the larger our division ratio, to whatever algorithm there is to Leadership, an increasing Organizational and Morale penalty trickles higher and higher to affect all divisions overall?

I really love the screenshots I think the work is amazing. Perhaps just me but it's difficult to differentiate the terrain I think it is Hills in Berceto, to Rapallo mountainous coastline? But I'm so glad we have some form of representation for our research with techteams gone.

Oh I get it, I'm really confused. Bleh I need to go to sleep. Edited this like 4 times lol...
 
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How does one replenish leadership points spent on research or the officer corps?
 
That is an excellent feature never would have thought of such a thing being implemented myself, although I am dissapointed no new British Screenshots were shown ;).
 
Wobbler said:
How does one replenish leadership points spent on research or the officer corps?

leadership is a resource gained like manpower, and spent through sliders daily.
 
Intruguing.

Return of clerks (R&D) and officers from Vicky, but in new shiny version? I like it. Hell, I love it.

Are they province based? Can be lost in strategic bombing? To what extend can you use occupied countries "leadership"? Are they semistatic value (short duration of the game) or can those groups be expanded? So many questions...
 
Wobbler said:
How does one replenish leadership points spent on research or the officer corps?

It's probably a lot like Education points in Victoria. Replenished over time based on some national factor. In Victoria it was based on your Literacy rate and the number of educated pops.
 
Johan said:
As you invest more in leadership your divisions can take more punishment. Taking casualties, building more troops, plus the occasional officer purge will mean your units will fall apart more easily in combat

oooh. this will be an interesting addition (or replacement) to the "standing army" vs "drafted army" slider :)
 
I'm not sure I like the whole leadership thing. It can be a nice feature though, if balanced correctly. I don't understand it fully yet, so I guess I have to be patient :)
The first screenshot looks absolutely fantastic. I really hope the final product will look like that. I could look at it for hours :eek:o

Btw; these layers on the map. Are they computationally heavy? Does it put alot of strain on the GPU (I'm assuming it's the GPU that's handling it) to use alot of layers? It would be interesting to know how you made it work with reasonable efficiency, but I'm guessing that's not something you're gonna reveal.
 
He-Man said:
In what resolution will HOI 3 be published? Will the widescreens be supported?

any directx supported one from 1028x768 and up.
 
It sounds quite nice, though IMHO "leadership" isn't the correct word for what it's representing. I can't think of any suitable alternative at the moment however.
 
Myth said:
It sounds quite nice, though IMHO "leadership" isn't the correct word for what it's representing. I can't think of any suitable alternative at the moment however.

we toyed with replacing LD with "white collars" and MP with "blue collars".. but.. leadership is the one that felt best.. Intelligence felt wrong as well, as it conflicts with espionage etc.
 
Johan said:
Another little aspect of the map.. If you play in "counters-mode".. the camera is locked in full 2d and will not tilt for more dramatic 3d looks.

This made my day! And consider that today I was also hired after a long period of unemployment! :cool:

So far is looking really good!

Ricroma