- Dec 14, 1999
- 19.194
- 80.194
Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of the weekly developer diary of HoI3. We've been battling through the harsh cold snowstorms of this week to continue the development. One of our programmers had to spent over 24 hours at an airport from sunday waiting to get home.
Anyway, we've been working hard lately, developing the core of our new revolutionary intelligence system, trade agreements, and polishing aspects of the resource system.
For todays feature, we'll be talking about the details of designing your own divisions.
Division design was one of these features that we have always toyed with when it comes to the Hearts of Iron series, so why add it now? First off we felt that division design added strategic choices. Secondly we can create, through standard templates, that the AI likes to use, a means to make different countries play differently from each other.
In conception the system is very simple, you can create a division of between 1 and 4 brigades, rising to 5 if you have right doctrine research. Each brigade increases the cost and combat power of the division. Support Brigades, like artillery, add no combat width to a division, while primary brigades, like infantry, increase the combat width. For those of you who have not been following our Development Diaries, combat width is a measure of how much space a division takes up. Each brigade also increases the IC, time and manpower cost of the division. Our first strategic choice is quite simple less more powerful division or fewer weaker divisions.
However there are deeper choices here, this system allows you to create highly specialised divisions suitable for a small number of roles or more generalised divisions which although do not excel anywhere can fight in may situations. Which do you choose? Each has its advantages, each has its disadvantages, the choice is yours.
In order to set up the scenarios with a fair reasonable amount of accuracy we are going to have to define division templates for the major countries. I know some of you are going to feel keenly our failure not model the unique features of the Cuban army and not buy the game, but sadly these are the tough choices you face when planning development. These templates will be essential because to be quite frank here it is going to be impossible to individually script the thousands of divisions you will find in WWII. So as we have to create these anyway we felt why not put them to another use. The major powers will have available historical divisions you can choose to build, instead of having to go through the trouble of designing your own. The AI will prefer these, and for those of you who want that extra level of historical immersion you too can choose to use these as well.
Now, for the first time in the HoI3 developer diaries, we'll show you a screenshot of an interface. Here you'll see how the division designer currently looks like, all accessible at one page.
You are probably going off to play some guessing games about the icons on the screen. Well it would be wrong to keep you in suspense too long, so we’ll talk a bit more about units in the next developer diary.
Anyway, we've been working hard lately, developing the core of our new revolutionary intelligence system, trade agreements, and polishing aspects of the resource system.
For todays feature, we'll be talking about the details of designing your own divisions.
Division design was one of these features that we have always toyed with when it comes to the Hearts of Iron series, so why add it now? First off we felt that division design added strategic choices. Secondly we can create, through standard templates, that the AI likes to use, a means to make different countries play differently from each other.
In conception the system is very simple, you can create a division of between 1 and 4 brigades, rising to 5 if you have right doctrine research. Each brigade increases the cost and combat power of the division. Support Brigades, like artillery, add no combat width to a division, while primary brigades, like infantry, increase the combat width. For those of you who have not been following our Development Diaries, combat width is a measure of how much space a division takes up. Each brigade also increases the IC, time and manpower cost of the division. Our first strategic choice is quite simple less more powerful division or fewer weaker divisions.
However there are deeper choices here, this system allows you to create highly specialised divisions suitable for a small number of roles or more generalised divisions which although do not excel anywhere can fight in may situations. Which do you choose? Each has its advantages, each has its disadvantages, the choice is yours.
In order to set up the scenarios with a fair reasonable amount of accuracy we are going to have to define division templates for the major countries. I know some of you are going to feel keenly our failure not model the unique features of the Cuban army and not buy the game, but sadly these are the tough choices you face when planning development. These templates will be essential because to be quite frank here it is going to be impossible to individually script the thousands of divisions you will find in WWII. So as we have to create these anyway we felt why not put them to another use. The major powers will have available historical divisions you can choose to build, instead of having to go through the trouble of designing your own. The AI will prefer these, and for those of you who want that extra level of historical immersion you too can choose to use these as well.
Now, for the first time in the HoI3 developer diaries, we'll show you a screenshot of an interface. Here you'll see how the division designer currently looks like, all accessible at one page.
You are probably going off to play some guessing games about the icons on the screen. Well it would be wrong to keep you in suspense too long, so we’ll talk a bit more about units in the next developer diary.
