Chapter II
The Second New Deal
Actually, I have no idea why I called the second Chapter a 'Second' New Deal. Anyway, unlike in Volume I, I won't be able to start IC-whoring for a little while. The ships I'm still building and this Great Depression together have a rather big strain on my economy as it is, I can't afford any new projects (the 2.5 IC I have above production, supplies and consumer goods goes towards upgrade, providing 6.34%). On the other hand, if I can manage to keep a money buffer of at least 100, I will be able to continue the decision-driven New Deal every three months or so, which has a chance of giving up to two factories. I might get lucky, but it's not guaranteed. After all, no economy-stimulating program can be foolproof!
And since I won't really have anything urgent to do for a long time, I let the game play while I'm writing and watching bass-solos on youtube
Of course it doesn't take too long for storaging problems to start showing:
Even with the insane industrial capacity of the United States, it won't be possible to hoard immense amounts of surplus resources.
This is not really a problem, my resource output is still in the positive and I have huge stockpiles anyway, but that's only the first round. The secound round hit in early March, bringing my Oil, Energy and Metal input into the negative. But not to worry, it will go away soon enough. Anyway, with two Destroyers already finished, my IC that I can allocate to upgrades increased to over 16! Excellent! By June, I'll have another 16 from finishing a Heavy Cruiser and a Submarine Flotilla. In other news, Spain held elections in March. We'll come back to that later.
You might remember me mentioning the Naval Treaties. The second one was just held in London, in late March, and the result was fairly historical:
France and the UK signed the treaty, Japan and Italy didn't. In fact, they abandoned the older ones as well.
I chose to sign the Treaty mainly because leaving wouldn't have any advantages for me. The -3 Neutrality wouldn't last long with my Monroe Doctrine combined with the Neutrality effect. Gaining 50 relations with the Allies doesn't really matter either, but whatever.
Other than that, the usual stuff was happening: Germany reoccupied the Rheinland, George V of the British Empire died of old age to be succeeded by his first born son as Edward VIII. You know. I also got an investment opportunity:
Since I have 3000 money, of course I can spare 500 for 7.5% Research Efficiency!
These little events come into play if you have lots of money and you can't really do anything with it. They represent private initiatives you can invest into for some long-term advantages. There are like a dozen of them, all with different bonuses and only one can be in effect at a time, so you might want to turn down the one you get first so there's room for another, more beneficial one. For me, the Resarch Efficiency bonus was absolutely worth it. If for nothing else, it reminded me that I should switch on the pause and the popup when a research project is done...
It looks like this AAR will have a lot more screenies than the first Volume did. There's a lot more stuff going on in the SF version...
As you can see, May was a rather busey month. France held elections, bringing the Social Liberal party, the ARV into power. (They might have been in power to begin with, I don't know.) In the HPP, political party names now start with the initials of the party's ideology, so in the Diplomacy screen when you check a country, you will know which party is in power even if you don't speak Spanish for example or don't know all the party name abbreviations of the '30s of the whole World by heart. I for one wouldn't know (or care) which ideology Paradox connected the ARV to, so it's a nice little addition. (I probably think that because I introduced this change exactly for my own convinence
)
In Greece, things are a bit more chaotic. Insert historical lesson about the Ottoman Empire, the Greek War of Independence, the First Balkan War, the Greek Constitutional Monarchy and the Metaxas Regime here. If you want to. We won't, this is regular!
Meanwhile in Asia, Japan formed a puppet in Inner Mongolia called Mengkukuo (which sounds a bit too much like Manchukuo if you ask me). Of course the Republic of China wasn't all that happy about this, but they are still rather occupied by their Civil War trying to purge the Communists.
My techs are going ahead nicely. Being behind schedule has the strange benefit of being able to research lots of similar techs in quick succession, bringing your theories through the roof. Which is rather unrealistic, which is why we will do a complete overhaul of the practical/theory system in the FtM version. But that's a topic for a different thread. Suffice it to say that I will be up-to-date in Infantry techs in no time.
Edward VIII's reign wasn't long-lived, he abdicated in June to marry a divorced American woman. If the CIA existed at the time, I'm sure there would have been conspiracy theories that it was all planned out. Well, actually I'm pretty sure there are some involving the Abwehr, too
Anyway, this will make it much less likely that the UK accepts (or offers) a peaceful solution to the war once France goes down. But it's still possible.
Interestingly enough, Spain is rather quiet. I thought their Civil War is supposed to trigger soon after their Election, but that was three months ago. What takes you so long?! At least Italy is done in Ethiopia by mid-June. That might seem like a long time to solve that front, but in the HPP they have historical amounts of troops there, causing all kinds of supply problems. Like they should.
Once I get below about 50000 Energy, my storaging problems start to get solved, bringing me into the positive in production again. Actually, the problem with this concept is that the AI is still not very good at detecting when it's low on resources because of too low input or because of too high stockpiles. I'll have to fix that soon I guess... But for now the important part is that I produce like 50 Energy a day (while I was losing like 200 a day before).
Olympic Games are held in Berlin in August, 1936. A nice, but pretty much irrelevant event. The only interesting thing about it is that if no majors are at war with eachother at the time, then similar games may be held in 1940 and 1944 too. I remember one of the openings a few years back in which the Olympic Torch was brought into the stadium by some athlete, and I think he cut ribbons for every game held since the restarting of the events in 1896 and he fell after the one in 1936 and only got up at 1948. Very symbolic.
By the way, did you notice that the auto-sliders in production are pretty much mandatory in HoI3 because of peacetime manpower rotation? You are continuously losing men due to that (people leaving the military I guess), causing the reinforcement need to jump back and forth all the time. It becomes very frustrating after a while to manually readjust the sliders every day. I prefer the Prioritize Production option because I like my stuff to be produced ASAP.
In September, my CAGs are finished, which is a huge relief for my Industry. Those little buggers are rather expensive! Well, actually they are the cheapest of the Aircraft, but still, they cost more than the Carrier itself! On the other hand, a with the current 10% discount from practical they take about 200 days to produce, while a Carrier takes over two years. That has two major consequences. First, you can build your Carriers and your CAGs independently. That might be good because CAGs tend to get beaten after a while and it is nice to have some replacements. (Although the AI would probably not use them even if it had any, so this is kind of an exploit.) And second, you can upgrade and repair your CAGs much faster because the engine takes the base cost and build time as a base for calculating repair and upgrade cost and time. In vanilla, CAGs share the same production time as Carriers but with a very low cost, making them very cheap but very slow to upgrade and repair. In the HPP they are more balanced in this respect.
With the Carriers finished in early October, I start my Applied Nuclear Program with five Nuclear Research Labs in a row. Now if you are not familiar with the HPP, you might be wondering, how on Earth can I even start building these. In the HPP, you can build a Nuclear Research Lab already with the first tech, Atomic Research. In fact, you can't go forward with the Nuclear Research tech unless you already have at least a level 1 Nuclear Research Lab somewhere. Isotope Separation, the third tech, requires a level 2 Nuclear Research Lab, etc. The downside is that it costs 75 IC and takes 260 days for the first level. But it will speed up considerably after that. Point is I want to be ready when I get to the action. Rocket Test Sites work similarly and I would prefer to have one of those too, but that's another 30 IC and I can't afford that yet. (I have this strange perversion that I never start a production that I can't fully finance...)
The Reich proposed the Anti-Comintern Pact in October, and the Kingdom of Italy and Hungary signed that proposal immediately. Japan followed suit the next day and so did Yugoslavia.
But still there's no Spanish Civil War. Theoretically that war can be averted, but that would require a very high National Unity, which Spain doesn't have. And in the end it really did happen, although only in November.
The first signs of trouble in Europe.
This event is broken down into a somewhat longer chain of events in the current version of the HPP. First, there's the election. Then once that's done, an event will happen sooner or later (unless, as I said above, Spain has extraordinaly high National Unity), which triggers several revolts accross the country. The main reason for this is to lure the AI's armies away from the Portugese border, where they are always stationed. A week later the maintenance country (GOD) will fire a decision to kick off the actual Civil War. That works similarly to the vanilla event, with a few little twists. First of all, the Nationalists get practically all of the Army (and Navy and Air Force). This is not completely realistic (the Navy mostly sided with the Republicans for example), but since we can't split the troops based on unit types, that's the best we can do. The Republicans will have a decision that will give them tons of Militias, representing the popular support of the government. They usually still don't have enough forces to establish a proper front line and the chances depend very much on the starting positioning of the units, but all in all it is a relatively good model. Sometimes it lasts a bit too long though, when one side is forced back into a single city and they hold out there for years, under siege. That's rather lame, not climactic at all. Anyway, here's another screenshot:
Spain at the start of the Civil War.
And with that I finish this second Chapter. With the change in style, I guess Volume II will be a lot longer than Volume I was... Hope you don't mind