- Dec 14, 1999
- 19.189
- 80.111
Hello everybody, and welcome to the sixth chapter of the development diary. It has been another week of development with alot of work on intelligence, diplomacy and convoys.
One aspect that have changed in the game since we last talked is the resources. After long consideration, we decided to make logistics and convoys work more intuitively so we splitted up oil into crude oil and fuel. Crude Oil is now produced in provinces and converted from energy while fuel is consumed by units. Fuel is created out of Crude Oil in amounts depending on your total IC and your refinery technologies every day.
So, now when that is out of the way, lets talk in detail about Politics.
Although Hearts of Iron 3 is a war game and our main focus is on the war aspect we felt we could not neglect the home front and in particular politics. We felt the Hearts of Iron 2 event heavy system didn’t do quite what we wanted due to its static nature, making it harder to react to changing situation. So we aimed to set up a system that was more dynamic in nature but wasn’t so detailed you spent more time on your internal politics than you did fighting wars.
To start with we now have political parties. We are added in flavour names for the major political parties in the world. Thus instead of America having the Social Liberals in power in 1936 it will have the Democrat Party, although the countries ideology will still be Social Liberal. We also have different government types defined, that determine when a country has an election and who is elected. Thus US it is the Head of State who is elected, while in the UK the Head of Government who stands for election. We felt this nice little changes would add a bit of flavour to the countries.
However the first big change is a concept we call party organisation. This is a dynamic variable that can be altered via espionage in either your home country or others and via events and decisions. This represents how well a particular ideology is organised, covering a broad brush stroke of concepts from party membership, newspaper editorial stance, the views of opinion formers in the country, actual campaigners going out trying to convince people to support them, just give you an idea. For an ideology group that is out of power it also reflects the chances of a coup d’etat, if a democracy has well organised fascist parties then the risks of a right wing coup d’etat are much greater than in a country where they have simply no organisation.
We also have the popular view, this shows the support each party has, think of it as a sort of opinion poll question if there was an election today how would you vote? However the party organisation then caps a particular party’s chance of victory. Thus even if your country’s popular view is ready to elect Left Wing Radicals, but they aren’t very well organised they won’t actually win. The Left Wing Radicals simply can’t get the vote out or people think it is wasted vote, etc. There are a number of factors that influence how popular view shifts, here are a few to give you some flavour. The party organisation is one factor; the parties themselves through their campaigning ability can swing the popular view their way. If you have revanchism (i.e. cores on other countries) then this will up support for right wing nationalist parties. Dissent moves the popular view away from the current governing ideology. The countries current diplomatic alignment will also influence the support of parties, a country aligned with Comintern will see support rise for parties on the left.
In summary we aim to do away with a lot of the events and instead have a system that reacts more to the situation, but also a system that you can influence. You don’t just have to conquer, a bit of espionage can see a friendlier government come to power in your neighbours.
Ok, so its time to show a screenshot as well. Here you see the changes done to the topbar we talked earlier, as well as some changes to the map in england.
One aspect that have changed in the game since we last talked is the resources. After long consideration, we decided to make logistics and convoys work more intuitively so we splitted up oil into crude oil and fuel. Crude Oil is now produced in provinces and converted from energy while fuel is consumed by units. Fuel is created out of Crude Oil in amounts depending on your total IC and your refinery technologies every day.
So, now when that is out of the way, lets talk in detail about Politics.
Although Hearts of Iron 3 is a war game and our main focus is on the war aspect we felt we could not neglect the home front and in particular politics. We felt the Hearts of Iron 2 event heavy system didn’t do quite what we wanted due to its static nature, making it harder to react to changing situation. So we aimed to set up a system that was more dynamic in nature but wasn’t so detailed you spent more time on your internal politics than you did fighting wars.
To start with we now have political parties. We are added in flavour names for the major political parties in the world. Thus instead of America having the Social Liberals in power in 1936 it will have the Democrat Party, although the countries ideology will still be Social Liberal. We also have different government types defined, that determine when a country has an election and who is elected. Thus US it is the Head of State who is elected, while in the UK the Head of Government who stands for election. We felt this nice little changes would add a bit of flavour to the countries.
However the first big change is a concept we call party organisation. This is a dynamic variable that can be altered via espionage in either your home country or others and via events and decisions. This represents how well a particular ideology is organised, covering a broad brush stroke of concepts from party membership, newspaper editorial stance, the views of opinion formers in the country, actual campaigners going out trying to convince people to support them, just give you an idea. For an ideology group that is out of power it also reflects the chances of a coup d’etat, if a democracy has well organised fascist parties then the risks of a right wing coup d’etat are much greater than in a country where they have simply no organisation.
We also have the popular view, this shows the support each party has, think of it as a sort of opinion poll question if there was an election today how would you vote? However the party organisation then caps a particular party’s chance of victory. Thus even if your country’s popular view is ready to elect Left Wing Radicals, but they aren’t very well organised they won’t actually win. The Left Wing Radicals simply can’t get the vote out or people think it is wasted vote, etc. There are a number of factors that influence how popular view shifts, here are a few to give you some flavour. The party organisation is one factor; the parties themselves through their campaigning ability can swing the popular view their way. If you have revanchism (i.e. cores on other countries) then this will up support for right wing nationalist parties. Dissent moves the popular view away from the current governing ideology. The countries current diplomatic alignment will also influence the support of parties, a country aligned with Comintern will see support rise for parties on the left.
In summary we aim to do away with a lot of the events and instead have a system that reacts more to the situation, but also a system that you can influence. You don’t just have to conquer, a bit of espionage can see a friendlier government come to power in your neighbours.
Ok, so its time to show a screenshot as well. Here you see the changes done to the topbar we talked earlier, as well as some changes to the map in england.
As Germany will surrender in May 1945!
