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Development Diary #13 - 21st of January 2009

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Radu said:
But on the other hand,what were sliders,really.
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The means to model Romania's slow slide into dictatorship, for example. Apparently, HoI3 will present us with a binary choice of either being under Antonescu, or not. There is no middle ground. There is no tightening grip of the royal police. Nothing. You're either are a functioning democracy, or you are not, and there is nothing inbetween. That's just a very poor model.
 
Popularity is a fine thing for a leader to know their support, but it is also important to know how popular you are in the army. Many popular leaders were thrown out by the generals. and here nothing measures that.
 
Alexander Seil said:
The means to model Romania's slow slide into dictatorship, for example. Apparently, HoI3 will present us with a binary choice of either being under Antonescu, or not. There is no middle ground. There is no tightening grip of the royal police. Nothing. You're either are a functioning democracy, or you are not, and there is nothing inbetween. That's just a very poor model.
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Wow, you have inside knowledge of the laws there will be! Tell us more!

I think laws can model this slow sliding much better, because you actually SEE what laws are passed and how the country is slowly reformed, instead of being slightly more authorian on the january 3rd then you were on december 29th.
 
Yummie! The dimensions keep getting new dimensions, and then those dimensions gets dimensions, and then... :D
 
Catkind said:
Popularity is a fine thing for a leader to know their support, but it is also important to know how popular you are in the army. Many popular leaders were thrown out by the generals. and here nothing measures that.
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Very true. Some army officers might even try to assassinate a leader :D. Maybe this is partly reflected by 'National Unity'.
 
Well just a couple of questions leap to mind:

1) It looks like Hilter and Hess are fixed to their job. What things can a player do to influence a change in head of government or head of state?

2) You have implied that a ministers performance may be affected by other factors in the game. Does this mean their abilities are variable? e.g. Hess might not actually be able to deliver +10%IC or that his +10% bonus may decrease or increase over time?
 
mbb said:
2) You have implied that a ministers performance may be affected by other factors in the game. Does this mean their abilities are variable? e.g. Hess might not actually be able to deliver +10%IC or that his +10% bonus may decrease or increase over time?
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No we implied that ministers didn't need to just have the abilities we listed they could have and thus the choice of foriegn minister could effect something other than drift.
 
mbabbs said:
Yeah agreed. For colour blind people like me, those colours are really difficult to differentiate between. Is it possible to have tooltips to indicate the political standing of a minister and also the popularity percentage on the pie chart ?
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I too am color blind and this is my biggest problem with a lot of strategy games. The more distinct the colors, the better.
 
I like it alot. A real alive and kicking political model, not just bland slider-moves. Well done!

@Alexander_Seil:
You are way too negative about things you obviously have no (inside) knowledge about. I'd much rather have the devs answer questions about the possibilities and implications of the model than have to defend it against outcries like "[it's] just a very poor model"...

Keep the DD's coming Paradox! :)
 
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Alexander Seil said:
What really bothers me is the possibility of losing a lot of national differences because of the absence of a slider system. In HoI2 you could have minute differences between Norway and Sweden (one could be a little more right-wing, the other could be a little bit more authoritarian, etc.). By making it all into a handful of laws, you lose a lot of granularity. I mean, how many laws are there going to be for countries like Norway and Sweden? 10? There are, by contrast, hundreds of sliders combinations. This very, very sad.
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Equally, sliders were in some ways very constricting. You could only make small steps, not big ones (except by event). So elections had to be events.

There were plenty of countries where opinion was very polarised - in the UK between Market Liberals and Social Democrats, or in Republican Spain between Paternal Autocrats and Left-Wing Radicals.

I'm much happier with the replacement of governments being organic to the game, than I am with it being driven by events.

@King or Johan - Would I be right in guessing that diplomatic drift also has an effect on the popularity or organisation of the different parties? E.g. if you are drifting towards the USSR, this affects the Left and Right-wing parties as well?
 
mbb said:
1) It looks like Hilter and Hess are fixed to their job. What things can a player do to influence a change in head of government or head of state?
?
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Here:
Johann said:
Before we launch into this let’s recap briefly about party organisation, as seen a previous developer’s dairy. Each party has a value representing its relative organisation value inside the country. This number is listed between 0-100 and the total organisation value inside a country will also be 100. This is a 0 sum game where increases in organisation by one party hit the others. This in turn feeds into a party’s ability to mobilise support for things like elections and, for those more cloak and dagger types, coups.
First off I suppose your are wondering what happens if you end up with someone like the National Socialists as the largest party but your country is a democracy. In this scenario your democracy is living on borrowed time. Sooner or later there will be a fire in the parliament building, a state of emergency and a dictatorship. Now I know what you are thinking, what are the odds? However as with all these things we work on the policy, well it could happen.
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King said:
It's amazing what your police force can do against those who oppose you if you are willing to invest the leadership points.
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If they will fully take power you cant do nothing?
Maybe there will be law for banning parties? So unlock as no.
Opposition must be strong - there must be election and so on?
We will see
 
Dakk said:
I like it alot. A real alive and kicking political model, not just bland slider-moves. Well done!

@Alexander_Seil:
You are way to negative about things you obviously have no knowledge about. I'd much rather have the devs answer questions about the possibilities and implications of the model than have to defend it against outcries like "[it's] just a very poor model"...

Keep the DD's coming Paradox! :)
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And from absence of information, you conclude that your jubilant assessment is justified, while mine is not?

This is a forum for discussion, which includes criticism, for which I provided a very good reason (difference in the number of possibly slider and law combinations). It's up to you to counter that with an argument other than "I'm sure Paradox is faultless and you don't understand anything."
 
TheLand said:
Equally, sliders were in some ways very constricting. You could only make small steps, not big ones (except by event). So elections had to be events.

There were plenty of countries where opinion was very polarised - in the UK between Market Liberals and Social Democrats, or in Republican Spain between Paternal Autocrats and Left-Wing Radicals.

I'm much happier with the replacement of governments being organic to the game, than I am with it being driven by events.

@King or Johan - Would I be right in guessing that diplomatic drift also has an effect on the popularity or organisation of the different parties? E.g. if you are drifting towards the USSR, this affects the Left and Right-wing parties as well?
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That would be easy enough to rectify by having an incoming party change the sliders every so slightly in some direction pre-determined for their ideology. In addition, they could be restricted as to the direction and the range of slider changes they could impose while in power.

By the way, EU3 shows that sliders could be easily combined with Laws.

I'm not sure how adding laws, by themselves, enables you to model a polarized public opinion, or contradictory government policy. That would depend on having well-designed and fairly complex laws, and a good number of them, too. Paradox's laws in other games (CK, EU3, VV) all suffer from being relatively limited in scope, typically providing one predictable bonus, and a predictable malus.* That's good enough for a game like VV, where much of the politics is actually character-driven, but it doesn't bode well for having any nuance in this new political system.

* Well, I'll have to exempt CK. The laws there are typically too poorly documented for the player to be able to reliably distinguish between their effects, without reading the triggers for every event in the game.
 
So there are gonna be movement speed differences? Combat movement and non-combat movement? (chief of staff) What about redeploing?
Is combat movement speed only during attack or is it more like tactical movement (more cautious)?
 
King said:
Hearts of Iron 3 is still a war game, we only need enough nuance in so far as the war goes.
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The question is, will it have less nuance than Hearts of Iron 2? Also, incidentally, a war game. But Japan and Romania there, for example, exist along a continuum between a parliamentary system and a paternalistic dictatorship. Is there any way that HoI3 could model the in-between (not necessarily through politics, but also diplomacy and intelligence), or is there merely a binary choice of parliamentarism versus dictatorship?
 
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