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21oliver

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Jun 8, 2010
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I just happened to notice something and was sort of taken aback. With all the turmoil surrounding China and its various factions during the period of World War Two and the obvious unified direction of Japan and its people, Government etc... (other then the in house fighting between Army and Navy) is there any logical reason why Nationalist China would have a higher National Unity then Japan? In fact Im surprised that Japan's isnt up in the 90s like Germany rather then hovering at 70. I have no practical knowledge other then the general assumption of Japan and its peoples (again other then the in house fighting) from all i have seen seemingly united in common goals.

Anyone have any info that supports this situation, id be interested. Thanks -
 
It's probably more for gameplay balance ;)

Japan should be able to surrender from 2 A-bombs without having any of their homeland or much of the Chinese/Korean victory points occupied. I don't think that would be possible if their National Unity was to high.

Perhaps it could be made higher if Convoy raiding and Strategic bombing reduced it more, but I'm not sure about that as it's very hard to define "how much" of this that would happen in a 100% historical game. Another problem is that it's impossible for USA to bomb Japan from the historical bases in Saipan due to range issues currently.
 
that freakin game balance is going to drive me crazy! but ty :)


I just started a new game...National Unity = Japan/70 Nat China/88 pfffft
 
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What the Devs tried is most likely simulating history inside given game mechanics. In RL Japan never really tried to fully conquer China. They knew how daunting the task was - and how feeble the Japanese troops. To recreate that in game you need to make sure National China is only folding after a LOT of its cores are Japanese. And not before. In fact the Chinese dicides (plenty in that time frame) ARE already represented in form of the different Chinese factions.
Regards,
Thorsten
 
that freakin game balance is going to drive me crazy! but ty :)


I just started a new game...National Unity = Japan/70 Nat China/88 pfffft

I beg your pardon by in 3.05 FTM NatChi's NU is only 70.

Personally I find 70 NU frustrating regardless of country because without cheating it is impossible to go up to 80NU and make use of Heavy Industry Emphasis.
 
I saw 88, maybe it was through my spies, cant rem and they can be wrong, but it was a shocker... And to Morgon, my problem with alot of this is to get the end result we sometimes no longer recognize the game. Um ok developers we need the Soviets to beat the Germans most of the time and uh since we cant figure out how to do that, lets just give them some aircraft carriers and nukes, what the hell as long as the result works.

The reality is China should be way below Japan in National unity. The developers need to find a way to represent the logistical and manpower, supply etc problems that make taking China all but impossible. IN HOI3 we are able to take a force and go from nation to nation conquering one after another with the same force with little or no attrition and or pause...

There should be no such thing as a battle with no casualties, they ought to scrap the whole org thing. And another thing, you should have to rest a certain amount of time and rotate troops in and out, and if you dont there should be heavy penalties...You should take months between new enemies and conflicts. In the Balkans you can conquer all of it in a year. Now maybe Germany could, but its doubtful another Balkan nation could, probably not in 3-4 years.

This is the old the end justifies the means deal. I just dont like it, some dont care, i do.
 
Yep i just loaded up a game as Nat China, they were 70. Must have been reading my spies who were wrong. Question is why is Japan 70 or as was pointed out so the US can nuke them into submission.
 
Yep i just loaded up a game as Nat China, they were 70. Must have been reading my spies who were wrong. Question is why is Japan 70 or as was pointed out so the US can nuke them into submission.

IMHO NU is pretty arbitrary and for gamebalance. US, UK, ITA all have 80 NU. USSR will have about 77. GER can have as high as 94 by 1936. Most people have 70 or less. But Belgium and Netherlands have at least 80 (so they go GiE when Germany comes knocking in 1940).

France starts with 35 but can have as much as 55 IIRC by 1940. I'm not French but I that's pretty low considering they WILL lose territory and VPs pretty fast against GER
 
France is pretty low, but their Govt and General Staff were a mess. Pretty much all ive seen shows a united and focused Japan, IMO it should be probably around 90+
 
There's no need to keep France's NU that low, the Vichy event fires when Germany controls certain provices. This has nothing to do with NU.

Japan on the other hand had a much weaker industry, so it does make sense to keep them from gaining heavy industry bonus, at least in this regard.
 
Thats sort of leads into other posts...Lets give Japan a false NU because otherwise it will affect another area.

You put the wrong wiring in your house, which forces you to bend a nail, and then you have to use the wrong paint because of the nail, and then you have to put a window instead of a door because of the paint, then you cant have a driveway because of the window....on and on. Can we get the first item right and all will hopefully follow suit?

Im no expert on Japans industry but werent they the biggest growing industry from say 1890-WW2 ? and if they were weak i doubt it had anything to do with National Unity, I think it was simply shortage of raw materials. Yes they couldnt produce like say the US Industry could. But why punish Japans National Unity? Change the way the other events and decisions fire, at least imo
 
Can we get the first item right and all will hopefully follow suit?
I think you need to look at game-development from another perspective.

Their ultimate goal is to make a game that people think is really really fun to play. Not to make a game that is an exact representation of WW2. Even if you could make a perfectly accurate WW2 simulator (which you can't) no one would buy it if it had a useless interface, tons of micromanagement and simply wasn't fun at all to play.

Besides trying to get each and every thing correct would mean developing the game for 10years, no developer has money to do that. And it still would be impossible to get everything right, because there is always another layer and you can always add more accuracy into infinity.
 
I understand and respect the developers i do, and the modders (hint hint). But i dont look at things from that perspective Alex. When you go to buy a car, and your not happy with the tires you dont want to hear about how hard it is to get the rubber in malaysia. Your paying for a car, you want it to be the best possible. This is perhaps the only place i have seen the company defended so much, and i think it has to do with so many here who mod, simply sympathize with the work involved. I worked in basic programming a bazillion years ago, i do understand.

All that being said, no one expects a game to be 100% historically accurate, it is simply impossible, we and i know that. No one wants to have fun more then me, Im the one who plays all the minors remember? But if you have to make certain things so far from reality (say as in Japans NU or Germanys Manpower), then you really need to start over and find a different way. I mean if the only way they can get Nat china to fight well against Japan is to give them the Atom Bomb in 1937 would that be ok? Would we still be having fun?

This is why things like manpower are an issue for me. When some people say they dont care. To me thats the very first thing that must be right. You get the manpower, the economics, resources, technology etc... you get all that right and THEN design a game. You dont design a game and modify those things to make it fit.

I think most of us love WWII more then we love the game itself. We play because its a vehicle for us to use to enjoy WWII not because its the best thing out there. To be honest i have a hard time getting past the early 1940s in any game before i quit because the game stops being fun. I wish that werent the case. I play WOW (the mmo), they have essentially ruined the game over the past 6 years in order keep it marketable. I only play occasionally now, and only because its the best available atm not because i love it.

At the very least get the basics right, get the info right, we can live with the game mechanic problems and work through them. My thoughts are such only because i designed games without the benefit of everything thats available today. I spent 10 years before i found one book that had some info i wanted. For me it is important to be accurate about the important things, the other stuff can be fudged thats all part of gaming.

What good is all this micro managing ability if the basic data is incorrect?
 
Well one of the problems I think is that in HoI3 they really tried to push out as many scenarios and as many provinces as possible.

That means most of the research and balancing work had to be spent on these rather then getting other data right.

Now when we have balanced the entire game around those (not fully accurate) base data you just can't redo them all, or much of the tedious balancing process we had over the last two years is lost.

So in the end it's all about priorities, they could have opted for better base data, but only at the cost of a single 1936 scenario and much much fewer provinces. It would have been Hoi3, but not the way we know it with many scenarios to choose from and complex manoeuvres due to the immense amount of provinces.

This approach was used for example in Victoria 2, where that base resource and population data is so much more important since that game has a much greater focus on economy.

If you think that economy is so important that you would rather have that part right instead of the scenarios and provinces, I would recommend Victoria 2, or one of the improved HoI2 versions like AoD or IC.
 
To me if the info isnt at least reasonably authentic then id make it a generic war game and not a WW2 simulation. If its too much to do, dont make the minors and other nations as playable nations (most of their info is off anyway). I guess its just me, im not used to putting out a product like that, i want the info to be right. I used to play a PBM game a long time ago by a guy in Canada. Of all things i got Turkey (lol not by choice). Now this was a game done by hand. He professed the historical accuracy of his game (it was wayyyy off). I lasted about 3 turns. He had the Ruler of Turkey wrong. I sent the guy a dozen forms of documentation readily available to anyone, he refused to change it or acknowledge its mistake. It just irked me so much, it was something that could have been so easily fixed.

Some things i know could not or would not be fixed due to alot of reasons, but many of the issues should have simply been done correctly the first time. The in-accuracy and lack of consistancy with the manpower issue world wide in this game could have been fixed at the start. Many people dont play the variety of nations i do, but to me at least there doesnt appear to be any rhyme or reason across the board and that manpower was determined on a nation by nation basis, almost on a whim rather then a set guideline. You have similar nations, with similar ideologies or situations, govts whatever with a wide varying manpower / population base.

Im not the only one. This forum exists..it has thousands of posts, and eliminating the "how do i" posts, they are mostly about what is wrong with / needs to be done / why is this type of a deal.

Now as a purely game goes i think theyve done a wonderful job and its depth is even more then i would have expected, i just dont consider it to have much to do with WW2 other then some pics and names. It is a sandbox game where a few nations are overpowered and we can play and have a hint of the flavor of the time period.
 
BTW i like the setup in HOI3 (map, units, pics, detail) and really do not like the other games enough to stay with them. WHich is why i keep coming back to HOI3 at least until i rem all the things that i dont like and then i take long breaks.
 
Its a game.

National unity is not a measure of historical unity, common purpose or political stability - Germany's national unity being high despite intense internal rivalries and plotting should demonstrate that. It is mainly a factor in a game mechanic which decides when a nation will surrender unconditionally. Germany's is high because practically all of Germany up to and including Berlin had to be captured before Germany surrendered unconditionally. Japans is much lower because practically none of the Japanese home islands had to be captured to cause them to surrender unconditionally. The Japanese certainly had cultural values around deference to authority and the shame of defeat, but they still surrendered unconditionally without anyone needing to do house to house fighting through Tokyo against 14 year old conscripts. Their national unity reflects that. As such the game mechanic works and is perfectly in line with the historical information.
 
So nothing in the game is as it appears? National Unity has no reflection on actual National Unity, Manpower does not reflect actual manpower.... lol then what are we doing? Its like everything has bandaids on it to hold it together, instead of each item being what it is supposed to be. Germany still had a very high national unity im sure, regardless of all the rivalries. The people, the military, the govt all followed Hitlers lead without question. Even all the way to the end of the war after all the defeats and the attempts on hitlers life..they still mostly followed him without question. Japan is a special case, even at the very end many elements in their government wanted to keep fighting. The A-bomb adds an asterisk to the war. Without the A-bomb how much longer would the war have gone on?

National Unity should stand for National Unity, it should have the same value across the board and have the same effect on every nation. If that means the gamers should change the way unconditional surrender is introduced then so be it.
 
"National Unity" is just a game concept. There is no "actual" National Unity to reflect. It exists only as a design concept/value to provide an input to a game mechanic in HOI3 with the aim of achieving a vaguely reasonable result. Which it does.
 
National unity stopped being a concept the moment it was implemented in the game, now it is a tangible item. And to keep Japans purposely low because you want to be able to force them to surrender after a few a-bombs is the wrong way to do it. Dont cut the rug short for your house and then have to move the furniture to make up for it. Get the rug right the first time, and then get the next item right and the next item right and so on like dominoes.

My Father must have worked on this game, i grew up in a house where everything sort of functions, looks like hell, isnt functioning properly but as long as we get by so what? bent nails, things cut short or on angles etc...

The answers that every tends to give is that they basically have no idea, nor did paradox, much of the game they just were winging it and then end was close enough to what they want its ok if the items that come before the end dont make sense. I just dont get it. Start at the beginning and get each thing right and move on, if you cant do it, then dont do it. I just never subscribed to bent nails.