Hi, and welcome to the fourth developer diary for the Hearts of Iron 3 DLC ”Dies Irae: Götterdämmerung” which features among many other things a German campaign focus. With Dies Irae: Götterdämmerung, you will be able to play Germany and only Germany, but like you never played it before in an Hearts of Iron game.
In this diary, we will talk a little bit about a thing that DI:G brings to HOI3: immersion.
U-Boats
We started from the fact that in our opinion the submarine warfare is too abstracted in the game and we wanted, in a Germany focus mood, to emphasis the whole U-Boats thing. Once we agreed on the basics we decided to create three more U-Boats units:
- Coastal Submarine, type II*. Small and cheap submarines with limited range.
- Medium Range Submarine, type VII*. The bulk of your submarine force, efficient and with range starting 1500 up to 3600 in the late war.
- Long Range Submarine, type IX*. The name speaks by itself, they are less efficient than the Type VII but they can operate far from their bases (up to the American coasts).
Along with the vanilla submarine that the AI uses while the player can't (the three types replace the vanilla submarine for Germany)
We introduced as well 21 new technologies related to those submarines, from the better hull to the underway refueling concept in order to make submarine warfare something worth spending leadership points for. As soon as the war starts, if you invested enough in the U-Boats you will be able to create chaos in the ennemy convoys, helped with several events.
As an example of the War of the Atlantic events, when war against England begins, you are informed about the advantage of sending u-boats to the Western Approaches near England, where most convoys historically, and in game, hit a bottleneck. When you conquer the French Atlantic coast harbours, you get an event proposing you to build U-Boats pens in several ports in order to protect your submarines against Allies raids. This will to a larger extent immerse the gamer in the choices faced by Germany in WW2, and make the Atlantic interesting. Also, the whole u-boat development programme will historically follow this development (like the schnorkel design being discovered in Holland after it is conquered).
But those events are not all about benefits. As you can see in the pictures above if you want to invest into submarine warfare you have to pay for it, starting with a better naval organization while air and land have some penalties. You are not forced to take the organization hit path and you totally can use the regular mechanics of the game but if you choose this path your ennemy will suffer a lot more than in HOI3. With an intense naval and air campaign, you can actually achieve the battle of Britain and greatly reduce UK's will to fight.
But act quickly, because after the "Happy Time" the Allies will start to really protect their convoys, represented by some tech bonus to your ennemy and after 1941 if you don't upgrade your U-Boats you might lose your wolves packs against the Allies ASW campaigns.
This is the end of this Dev Diary.
In the next one, we will talk about Reich Ministers and several events related to them.
--Devildread and Danevang
Bonus Screenshots:
For those who can't see the picture, you can find all of them in this ftp folder, thanks to Derkb for providing the server: http://didays.derkb.de/downloads/DiesIrae/
In this diary, we will talk a little bit about a thing that DI:G brings to HOI3: immersion.
U-Boats
We started from the fact that in our opinion the submarine warfare is too abstracted in the game and we wanted, in a Germany focus mood, to emphasis the whole U-Boats thing. Once we agreed on the basics we decided to create three more U-Boats units:
- Coastal Submarine, type II*. Small and cheap submarines with limited range.
- Medium Range Submarine, type VII*. The bulk of your submarine force, efficient and with range starting 1500 up to 3600 in the late war.
- Long Range Submarine, type IX*. The name speaks by itself, they are less efficient than the Type VII but they can operate far from their bases (up to the American coasts).
Along with the vanilla submarine that the AI uses while the player can't (the three types replace the vanilla submarine for Germany)
We introduced as well 21 new technologies related to those submarines, from the better hull to the underway refueling concept in order to make submarine warfare something worth spending leadership points for. As soon as the war starts, if you invested enough in the U-Boats you will be able to create chaos in the ennemy convoys, helped with several events.
As an example of the War of the Atlantic events, when war against England begins, you are informed about the advantage of sending u-boats to the Western Approaches near England, where most convoys historically, and in game, hit a bottleneck. When you conquer the French Atlantic coast harbours, you get an event proposing you to build U-Boats pens in several ports in order to protect your submarines against Allies raids. This will to a larger extent immerse the gamer in the choices faced by Germany in WW2, and make the Atlantic interesting. Also, the whole u-boat development programme will historically follow this development (like the schnorkel design being discovered in Holland after it is conquered).
But those events are not all about benefits. As you can see in the pictures above if you want to invest into submarine warfare you have to pay for it, starting with a better naval organization while air and land have some penalties. You are not forced to take the organization hit path and you totally can use the regular mechanics of the game but if you choose this path your ennemy will suffer a lot more than in HOI3. With an intense naval and air campaign, you can actually achieve the battle of Britain and greatly reduce UK's will to fight.
But act quickly, because after the "Happy Time" the Allies will start to really protect their convoys, represented by some tech bonus to your ennemy and after 1941 if you don't upgrade your U-Boats you might lose your wolves packs against the Allies ASW campaigns.
This is the end of this Dev Diary.
In the next one, we will talk about Reich Ministers and several events related to them.
--Devildread and Danevang
Bonus Screenshots:
For those who can't see the picture, you can find all of them in this ftp folder, thanks to Derkb for providing the server: http://didays.derkb.de/downloads/DiesIrae/