Part One – Setup
Hearts of Iron III is a
much more complex game than Darkest Hour, with far more moving parts to worry yourself about while playing. In this chapter, we’re going to discuss some opening moves for Germany, up to the invasion of Poland in 1939.
First of all, make sure you select your victory conditions before you start the game!
I’ve gone for a European-only set of victory conditions, because I don’t want any part of the dumpster fire that is the Japanese AI versus the USA. We will eventually need to support the Italians in North Africa to seize Suez and Baghdad, but the best way to do that is to take mainland Britain and starve the British troops in Africa of supplies by seizing Gibraltar and Malta.
Now, let’s go through all the opening screens before we unpause…
Intelligence
Intelligence became much more useful and intuitive in HoI3, but it can still be a bit scattergun; you can issue orders and make plans, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll come off! The traditional strategy is to put USA at the top of your priorities as ‘Promote Our Party’. The key idea here is that in the 1940 elections, the
German-American Bund will hopefully win, and this would help them drift away from the Allies, though I’ve never yet seen an Axis America.
We also send agents to perform
Tech Espionage in Britain, to steal as much technology as we can, and
Military Espionage in the Soviet Union, so we can get an idea of what sort of force levels the Soviets are working with. I have some spare spies so I also set up a
Tech Espionage mission in France, but I don’t expect to get much from them. We also use
Promote Our Party in Austria, to help trigger the Anschluss early. The Anschluss is based either on the popularity of the Nazi Party in Austria, or the date (March 1st, 1938). The earlier we can fire, the better!
Diplomacy
Diplomacy in HoI3 is also a lot more intuitive, because as far as I can tell there are no pre-existing numbers behind how likely a nation is to join your faction, unlike in Darkest Hour where you can have 200 relations and still have an alliance chance of zero. We influence the USA to counter British influence, and Yugoslavia to try and get them into the Axis.
Because annexation and Government in Exile change the way conquests work in this version of the game, it’s much harder to follow my plan from Darkest Hour of releasing large vassals like Scandinavia. Instead, I’m going to attempt to get everyone I can into an alliance through diplomatic means, and only go to war as a last resort.
Production
My plan follows mostly the same track as Darkest Hour – I will split my production between industrial capacity to steadily grow my ability to manufacture toasters, Volkswagens and the occasional war machine, submarines to sink enemy shipping and keep the waterways clear for Seelowe, and airplanes to allow me to dominate the skies.
The purpose of the mountain brigades is just to fill out the small mountain division you start with as Germany – I’m a little bit fussy when it comes to very small details like that in this game. I will eventually build out an entire mountain corps so that if we need to engage in mountainous terrain I can have an elite formation to manage it.
I’ve also ordered lots of Interceptors and Tactical Bombers – I like having stacks of eight of any planes that I have, so the first order is to get everything up to those numbers. After that, I’ll move away from Interceptors to Multi-Role Fighters for the improved range.
I’m also building (in no particular order, as tech becomes available) paratrooper divisions, radar stations, infantry and panzer divisions.
My infantry divisions contain
2 INF brigades, 1 AT brigade and 1 ART brigade. Each corps contains
4 of these divisions.
My panzer divisions contain
1 ARM brigade, 2 MOT brigades and one MOT-AA brigade. Each Panzerkorps contains
4 of these divisions.
In both of these division designs, we get a bonus to combat effectiveness from
combined arms – the idea is that a division of mobile infantry and tanks is more effective than a pure tank division, and adding artillery and mobile AA will make that division even more effective. The maximum combined arms bonus is 25%, which would require an infantry brigade, an armoured brigade, a direct-fire brigade like AT, a support-fire brigade like ART, and a specialist brigade like Engineers. I don’t think it’s worth sapping the direct strength of my divisions to add too many of these in, so I don’t bother with engineers.
One really important note! 'Practicals' are a concept introduced in HoI3, which represent that as nations produce more tanks, rifles, and toasters, they tend to get better at them. As a result, every time you build a given object, you gain a small amount of 'practical' in that field. The more 'practical' you have in an area, the faster and cheaper future builds are! By 1939, Industrial Capacity costs only 3.11 IC and takes just under eight months to build, so it's really worth ratcheting up the serial lines as you go; if you build lots of one or two divisions, they'll become very cheap and quick by the end of the game. If you spread yourself thin, however, you'll lose out on this efficiency bonus!
Practicals can spread in groups, so when you build a panzer division, you'll get 'mechanical' practical. This doesn't just speed up production of future panzers, but also anything motorised or mechanised! You can perform research to reduce the rate at which you lose practicals, but I don't think they're really worth it when there's so much else to choose from.
Technology
Research in Hearts of Iron 3 is much more involved than in Darkest Hour; instead of having a certain number of slots based on your IC, you instead get
Leadership points from your provinces. You then divide these points between recruiting officers, to make your forces more efficient in combat, spies, diplomatic influence points, for influencing other countries and inviting them to your faction, and technology research.
The number of technologies is WAY bigger in HoI3, so I prefer to set up my research at the start of the game and just leave the game to it. I’m focusing on
Infantry technologies because these will form the bulk of my army, and they lead to marine and paratrooper divisions,
artillery and anti-air technologies because of the supporting role they play in my divisions, and
armour because Germany, that’s why. We also work on airforce technologies and doctrines, but I don’t place too much value on air doctrines above land doctrines or the other tech groups. Finally, we allocate some research to improving our U-boots, but I don’t expect that we’re going to be hugely ahead of the curve in that field.
Any country should also be working on
Nuclear technology, industry, education, and resource production. Education allows us to get more leadership points, which means more research, and so on. Nuclear technology means that if we do somehow get into a protracted war, we can have access to the ultimate
Wunderwaffe (provided I remember to build a strategic airforce to deliver it!) while Industry and Resource are self-explanatory; the more IC I have, the better. The more IC efficiency I have, the cheaper everything is. The cheaper supplies are, the more IC I have to spare on building toasters and tanks!
My advice for any new players is to read through the tech tree and try to decide in advance what sort of force composition you want.
Politics
Much like in Darkest Hour, Hjalmar Schacht is your friend – he’s a straight +10% IC, and that’s simply too good to turn down – and unlike Darkest Hour, there’s no dissent hit! You do get a small increase in dissent accumulation because of ‘
Fractured Government’ when there are too many parties or ideologies in your cabinet, but that’s easy enough to deal with by increasing consumer goods production – and we more than cover our costs with that bonus IC!
I also recruit the odious Jeff Gobbles as
‘Man of the People’ which provides a +5% leadership bonus. As we discussed earlier, Leadership is a really valuable resource, so we want to maximise it in every way we can.
One neat little aside before we move on – Adolf Hitler is available as a Head of Army minister; apparently, he is a ‘Decisive Battle’ kind of chap. I think we’ll give him a miss, thank you very much…
I’ll come back here as good ministers arrive, but I’m not sure when the best ones emerge, so please do let me know if there are any really good ones that I might miss!
Status Pre-Fall Over
At the start of January 12th, 1939, I have
thirteen Infantry Corps available to me,
three Panzerkorps, and the supporting troops of the Hungarian and Slovakian armies. We have
sixteen TAC divisions, four FTR divisions, and eight INT divisions guarding the skies above north germany. The TAC divisions will run ground attacks in Poland in the encircled regions cut off by the Panzer advances, while the infantry corps slowly advance in the wake of the panzers. I anticipate we can have this war finished within twenty days, fingers crossed.
It is vital in HoI3 that Germany moves quickly – countries around you will be very quick to join the Allies, and if your forces are still in Poland when Belgium decides to join up you’ll find your industrial heartlands overrun by a combined Allied offensive before you can say
“Bringen sie mir Fegelein!”
There are five corps guarding the west border, plus my elite mountaineers on the hills facing France. Everything else, including my entire tank force, is tasked with the destruction of Poland. We wait a few more days for everyone to reach their staging positions, and then press the button.
Next time: Poland? More like My-land!