- Dec 14, 1999
- 19.193
- 80.166
Hello, we are back with the lucky 13th episode of the Hearts of Iron 3 development diary. Progress has been going strong the last week, and we’re happy with the feature we will be presenting today.
So we are back talking about politics. As mentioned in previous developer diaries, Hearts of Iron 3 is a grand strategy war game. Our main focus through out is on the war. However as some German guy once said, war is a continuation of politics by other means. So although we were never going to lavish a lot of attention on it, we felt that politics should at the very least get a little tender loving care. Our goal was to give the internal politics of a country have a little more depth and try to make it function more dynamically. The biggest restriction we placed upon our changes was that it should feel right for the era.
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.
Onto the cabinet, as with all the various incarnations of Hearts of Iron, there is a ten-man cabinet where each minister has a different type of effect. However with new toys we have to play with in Hearts of Iron 3 we have overhauled these effects. We personally felt that a lot of minister’s bonuses were independent of your current situation where we feel that the minister choice should reward long-term strategy. So let’s look at some of our new minister effects. Your choice of foreign minister will in the main affect your drift, thus who you pick will have a long term affect on which faction your country moves closest to. Same with your military staff positions they, in general, affect practical decay. So if you have Armoured Spearhead Doctrine Chief of the Army he will get you cheaper tanks and better tank technologies but to get the best out of him you are really going to need to build some tanks.
Next, as you are no doubt aware the trusty sliders have gone, to be replaced by laws. We like laws a lot more, because unlike sliders who have a fixed time limit between changes, with laws we can make the switch context sensitive. So consider the situation where your neighbour has become just a little bit threatening, so you up your draft level to increase the size of your army. Then your neighbour attacks you, in Hearts of Iron 2 you would have to wait until the next slider change, with laws since you are at war you can immediately start to mobilise your country for war. It also adds in the effect that moving towards a greater war orientation is not a simple annual step, but an actual process that takes into account the global situation.
Here’s a screenshot of Nazi Germany in 1936.
So we are back talking about politics. As mentioned in previous developer diaries, Hearts of Iron 3 is a grand strategy war game. Our main focus through out is on the war. However as some German guy once said, war is a continuation of politics by other means. So although we were never going to lavish a lot of attention on it, we felt that politics should at the very least get a little tender loving care. Our goal was to give the internal politics of a country have a little more depth and try to make it function more dynamically. The biggest restriction we placed upon our changes was that it should feel right for the era.
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.
Onto the cabinet, as with all the various incarnations of Hearts of Iron, there is a ten-man cabinet where each minister has a different type of effect. However with new toys we have to play with in Hearts of Iron 3 we have overhauled these effects. We personally felt that a lot of minister’s bonuses were independent of your current situation where we feel that the minister choice should reward long-term strategy. So let’s look at some of our new minister effects. Your choice of foreign minister will in the main affect your drift, thus who you pick will have a long term affect on which faction your country moves closest to. Same with your military staff positions they, in general, affect practical decay. So if you have Armoured Spearhead Doctrine Chief of the Army he will get you cheaper tanks and better tank technologies but to get the best out of him you are really going to need to build some tanks.
Next, as you are no doubt aware the trusty sliders have gone, to be replaced by laws. We like laws a lot more, because unlike sliders who have a fixed time limit between changes, with laws we can make the switch context sensitive. So consider the situation where your neighbour has become just a little bit threatening, so you up your draft level to increase the size of your army. Then your neighbour attacks you, in Hearts of Iron 2 you would have to wait until the next slider change, with laws since you are at war you can immediately start to mobilise your country for war. It also adds in the effect that moving towards a greater war orientation is not a simple annual step, but an actual process that takes into account the global situation.
Here’s a screenshot of Nazi Germany in 1936.
