Hi, and welcome to the third developer diary for the Hearts of Iron 3 DLC ”Dies Irae: Götterdämmerung” which features among many other things a German campaign focus. With Dies Irae: Götterdämmerung, you will be able to play Germany and only Germany, but like you never played it before in an Hearts of Iron game.
In this diary, we will mainly talk a about Barbarossa.
I had a comment in the previous diary, saying that we gave a lot of bonuses to Germany and that you might find the Dies Irae '36 campaign too easy.
Haha. You won't.
Operation Barbarossa
For us Dies Irae team, the Eastern Front is THE thing you don't want to miss in any historical german campaign. This is the very point of the last hours you spent in getting Europe and your OOB to act as you command. We heard the community about the soviet being a little to easy to break in the first weeks and then being a cakewalk. This is why we came with several features for both the AI and the player in order to make the whole thing a lot more difficult without too much cheating.
I know I told you we planned to talk about U-Boats and Ministers in this Diary but this Barbarossa thing is long enough for the moment. Here some random screenshots for your pleasure instead.
For those who can't see the picture, you can find all of them in this ftp folder, thanks to Derkb for providing the server: http://didays.derkb.de/downloads/DiesIrae/
-Devildread and Danevang
In this diary, we will mainly talk a about Barbarossa.
I had a comment in the previous diary, saying that we gave a lot of bonuses to Germany and that you might find the Dies Irae '36 campaign too easy.
Haha. You won't.
Operation Barbarossa
For us Dies Irae team, the Eastern Front is THE thing you don't want to miss in any historical german campaign. This is the very point of the last hours you spent in getting Europe and your OOB to act as you command. We heard the community about the soviet being a little to easy to break in the first weeks and then being a cakewalk. This is why we came with several features for both the AI and the player in order to make the whole thing a lot more difficult without too much cheating.
- Strategic Effects and Technologies
The first things we introduced were two strategic effects and their counter-technologies: General Winter and russian railways. As you know, the german soldiers weren't really prepared for a long campaign and like the french few decades earliers they were badly hit by winter. In DI:G, we changed some basic weather functions in order to have a very cold russian winter and to make units suffer from attrition a lot more than in vanilla HOI3. We also wanted to make the Barbarossa winter attrition even thougher by the addition of the strategic effect with 30% manpower income hit (abstractly representing the desertion/death or injuries due to the cold) and morale/organisation penalties.
Another big change in how the meteo system works is the longer time the snow and mud stay on the map and the severe supply tax they create, making any offensive during winter a nightmare for both German and Soviet sides. That way, you can observe an historical winter "truce" with your units and the ennemy's not being able to carry offensive without issues.
Left: Strategic Effects are very severe for the player, as historically the eastern front was not a cakewalk.
Right: Both above-mentionned effects can be canceled as soon as you research the related techs. You can even prepare winter equipment way before starting Barbarossa and then never suffer from General Winter strategic effect!
- A strong Soviet
All those nasty negative modifiers are not enough for our evil mind. We also added a bunch of enhancements for the Soviet AI, starting by giving it the historical capacity of reinforcements and building units the Red Army had during the first months of Barbarossa. In order to achieve that goal, we made a simple rule: the less units the red army has, the more quickly it will be able to reinforce and build. For instance, with less than 150 divisions, it will be able to build any unit with 90% time reduction and so on (with more than 300 division it has no bonus at all). Thus, no matter how many troops you will encircle in the first weeks of the campaign (hundreds of thousands prisonners, historicaly), you'll still have to deal with all those eastern reinforcements and fresh troops, thrown in the combat as soon as they exit the factories.
Along with those modifiers, we added little decisions for the Soviet AI to arm people from the factories whenever a german unit approach a major city. You as a player will experience some soviet partisans spawns in Leningrad, Kiev, Sevastopol or Moscow, willing to defend their cities against the fascist hordes and helped with a special partisan defense bonus in urban tiles. Just enough to slow down your advance a little and get some reinforcements in order to avoid the easy capture of Victory Points.
Let's face the truth: the Eastern Front should become your worst nightmare and without some audacious move and Blitzkrieg tactics, you shouldn't be able to win in Russia anymore.
December 42. Everything on AI control. I am starting to lose ground 300km from Moscow.
- The Holy Balance
Since we are also a little sadistic, we made impossible for Germany to choose anything else than Total Exploitation occupation policy in Soviet Union before '42. Then Full Occupation can be chosen, and in '43 you can have a Military Government. There is no way to have Collaboration Government in Soviet Union (or Poland by the way). That way you have a lot more ICs and ressources indeed, but you can't benefit from the soviet manpower and have to deal with some rebels. Also, you are not able to pick the Total Economic Mobilisation law before some conditions. Those conditions are to be met in the Totalen Krieg Speech decision, making almost impossible to go Total Economic Mobilisation before 43 (or anytime if you lose 15% of Germany core provinces, but I won't recommend you to try).
I can see your face right now, thinking "hell, I will never be able to win! God this Devildread guy is totally reading my mind." But DON'T PANIC.
We included a bunch of friendly stuff especially for you.
- Combat events are now totally put into historical background. No longer "Successful Battle of the Bulges" in 1940 saying how strong is USA while they are not yet involved in the war. Now you only have events against the right enemy and during the right year. Those events can lead to several bonus (including two new bonus: +10% morale and +10% organisation) to choose or the same one called "captured equipment" that give you 1% IC efficiency for a month. That way we modeled the fact that German army used a lot of foreign equipment (allowing you to build your divisions 1% faster for a month).
- Speaking of foreign equipment, as you might have seen in the Strategic Effect screenshot we also have a Foreign Wehrmacht Recruitment effect. This came from a decision you have to take earlier in the game (after you conquered your first foreign country) granting you some manpower bonus (10%) at the cost of 5% supplies penalty.
This Foreign Recruitment policy can lead you to several foreign units events such as Indische Legion, Division Azul and many more.
- You are not desarmed for Barbarossa, and if everything is done correctly, you are able to hit the Soviet so hard that the Red Army will take several days to get over it. We added a Surprise Attack decision leading to 50% land organisation and 70% air organisation hit for the Soviet Union during 21 days.
- In Dies Irae: Götterdämmerung, we also worked on the Reich Ministers, giving some bonus and penalties for some, and special events for others. If you manage your cabinet properly, you should be able to have some pretty powerful bonuses over your ennemies.
Look at all those friendly faces and positive modifiers they bring with them.
- Combat events are now totally put into historical background. No longer "Successful Battle of the Bulges" in 1940 saying how strong is USA while they are not yet involved in the war. Now you only have events against the right enemy and during the right year. Those events can lead to several bonus (including two new bonus: +10% morale and +10% organisation) to choose or the same one called "captured equipment" that give you 1% IC efficiency for a month. That way we modeled the fact that German army used a lot of foreign equipment (allowing you to build your divisions 1% faster for a month).
I know I told you we planned to talk about U-Boats and Ministers in this Diary but this Barbarossa thing is long enough for the moment. Here some random screenshots for your pleasure instead.
For those who can't see the picture, you can find all of them in this ftp folder, thanks to Derkb for providing the server: http://didays.derkb.de/downloads/DiesIrae/
-Devildread and Danevang