Chapter 1 - The Setup
The shape of Canada on January 1st, 1936
It's 1st of January, 1936. After the Statute of Westminster, 1931, Canada is acknowledged as coequal with the United Kingdom among the Commonwealth realms. Aside from some formal authority over certain constitutional matters, it has legislative authority, a Dominion no more. If you look from far enough, it looks very similar to its present day appearance, with the exceptions of Newfoundland and Labrador, which originated as separate Dominions and were granted their own independence but during the Great Depression, collapsed economically and were administered by an appointed governor between 1934 and 1949, effectively working as British overseas territory.
In this first chapter I will take a tour of the country, look at different tabs and panels and windows, check out the state of the World and my allies (and potential enemies) in it. My first step is towards Diplomacy.
That's a lot of regions!
There are some definite changes here compared to vanilla, the most obvious being all those region filters in the top left. Clicking through them I can immediately see the benefit of being able to only look at a few countries at a time. (Though Japan being alone in their category doesn't seem very useful and I don't immediately see the value of Australia and New Zealand as separate groups either. Maybe later?) I also noticed how the good old game master country was renamed from GOD to HPP. Good choice. The old name always led to confusion and unnecessary questions.
Looking at the info on my country, I can see we have a Non-Aggression Pact with the United States and the Commonwealth realms are represented by an Alliance of our own (independent from the Allies faction, representing the British-French alliance) and a guarantee of independence from the United Kingdom. I honestly don't remember what the vanilla situation is, only that the few independent Commonwealth nations are not in the Allies at the start but I'm not sure if they are in any way affiliated with the UK. The guarantee of independence seems somewhat redundant with the alliance in place but this feels appropriate to the situation at the time. After 1931, they can't be considered puppets anymore but they aren't fully independent either due to the personal union. (I wonder if there'd be any repercussions if I chose to dissolve the alliance. I suppose that could have been an option, representing a unilateral declaration of independence from the crown. At the very least the UK should vehemently oppose it, with potential escalation but I won't try that.)
Looking at the British Empire, it is mostly as I remember it from vanilla, except a large number of colonies represented as directly govern by the United Kingdom are instead puppets. In vanilla the only puppets are Iraq, Oman, Yemen, Buthan and Nepal. In HPP, India is a separate entity (should probably be called British Raj but whatever) and so are Egypt (except the Suez), Transjordan, Palestine and Malaya, all of them puppets of the United Kingdom and members of the Allies faction. Kuwait is a fully independent nation, allied with the United Kingdom but not in the faction. They are also guaranteeing the independence of a large part of Europe and elsewhere, notably including Czechoslovakia.
An important note concerning colonial empires (like the United Kingdom) is that unlike in vanilla, they no longer have cores on every single province they start with. For example, the United Kingdom only has cores in the Suez in all of Africa. Not having a core in a province gives 1 point of local Revolt Risk, potentially giving a small but constant chance of rebels spawning in the province. Certain government types (likely all democratic ones, I'm guessing) have a reduction in Revolt Risk which can offsets that.
The situation in the Americas and Europe seem largely as I remember from vanilla, though some names have changed a bit (like French Republic and German Reich). France also has some puppet regimes in their colonies (Syria, Lebanon and Indochina are not directly controlled) and China looks a bit different, mostly with Tibet stretching a bit farther East and the Guangxi Clique being twice as large. But more importantly there is an intricate web of relations between the different Chinese factions, most of all the Kuomintang and the Communist Party being at war at the start and there are some guarantees and alliances. Mainly the two main factions have a guarantee on every other faction. (The Commies even guarantee the Nationalists, while at war with them!) What I also noticed is the Dutch East Indies are an integral part of the Netherlands. This is in line with my limited knowledge about the colonial situation at the time, but I believe in the older versions of HPP there used to be a separate, puppet entity to help with the Dutch surrender after losing their continental territory. Now this must be handled via some sort of event or the Dutch are just left a little more active while kicked out of Europe I guess. (Also directly controlling the colony with the -50% resource penalty means the East Indies are highly underutilized throughout the era.)
Also there are two mod-related Decisions I could use for introducing the mod and for settings. I will return to those at the end!
Slightly different layout. Maybe could use some more work?
Looking at Politics, the first thing I noticed is the layout being a bit different (text still overflows here and there) and the list of Laws being somewhat different. I have some recollection about these but my memory is not crystal clear, so let's check them out!
Civil Laws concern how open your society is and the options are Open Society, Limited Restrictions, Legalistic Restrictions, Repression and Totalitarian System. The more oppressive Laws give higher Partisan Efficiency, lower Consumer Goods demand (especially at peace), a bonus to Counterintelligence and Counterespionage (I believe the former is the information provided by spies while the later is the ability to kill off spies) and hurt Ruling Party Support while the more open options give a Research Efficiency bonus.
Press Laws go from Free Press through Cencored Press, State Press to Propaganda Press. The more oppressive options help reduce War Exhaustion, National unity Changes (good and bad), Stategic Warfare effects and also increase Ruling Party Support (potentially offseting the penalty from Civil Laws). The more free options increase drift due to ideological similarities (ie. how much a Democracy will drift towards the Allies or a Socialist country drifts towards the Comintern).
Economic Laws range from Full Civilian Economy through Basic Mobilisation, Full Mobilisation, War Economy to Total Economic Mobilisation. The more Civilian oriented economies have very high Consumer Goods demands (war and peacetime as well) and also a resource production penalty and reduction in War Exhaustion while the more state controlled laws increase your IC total (but not your resource production!) and cause more War Exhaustion and cost some of your money but also increase Consumer Goods demand. Basically you have more IC to spend but you need to find the resources to feed it and ways to suppress the Dissent increase from spending the extra IC on anything but Consumer Goods, at least while at peace... Full Mobilisation might be a good middle ground.
Industrial Policy Laws are Consumer Product Orientation (increasing wartime Consumer Goods demand but decreasing peacetime demand and also production efficiency), Mixed Industry (reducing Consumer Goods demand in general but increasing both Supply Consumption and Supply Throughput) and Heavy Industry Emphasis (doing the opposite of Consumer Product Orientation but also increasing Supply Consumption and Throughput).
Taxation Laws replaces Education from vanilla and goes from Very Low through Low, Average, High to Very High Taxes. As you would expect, the lower the Taxes the less Money you make but your Ruling Party will be more popular and your War Exhaustion will go down. Higher than average taxes will also increase Consumer Goods demand while at peace (which in turn generates even more Money) as your citizens expect more stuff for their taxes.
Conscription Laws are very different compared to vanilla. That was one of the major changes in the mod back in the day. Instead of going from mild conscription to scraping the barrel, we had two separate types with a few levels for both: you could either have a Standing Army (where most of your troops are professional soldiers and volunteers) or a Drafted Army (where you mainly rely on people forced into the army on demand). A Standing Army will always have 35% Reserve Impact (ie. a Reserve Brigade will be at 65% while not mobilized) while a Drafted Army will always be at 50%. Both types have some Decision-based options to go beyond the basic system and gain further advantages at certain costs.
Training Laws are similar to vanilla with some important exceptions. First of all, shorter training will reduce Unit Recruit Time but increase Air and Naval Build Speed. For Air and Naval units the majority of the time needed to create the unit is spent on building the equipment which is not really affected by the intensity of training. The result should be fairly similar production times for ships and aircraft but more varried times for producing land units. Also importantly the higher Training Laws will improve Officer Recruitment which makes a lot of sense and there's a bonus to Reinforcement for the lower Laws since you don't train replacements long either.
The last category is International Status. This is completely new to HPP (or at least I don't remember what it's replacing...) and mainly affects your Leadership, which no longer comes from provinces. It has a simple progression of Undeveloped Country, Developed Country, Industrialised Country, Regional Industrial Power, Intermediate Industrial Power, Major Industrial Power, Great Industrial Power and Industrial Superpower (which is a lot more categories than there used to be). To my knowledge, your International Status can also have a wide range of effects on international relations and your Status is entirely dependent on your total IC (and not being a puppet). Canada starts as an Industrialised Country and could advance to Regional Industrial Power if Total IC would rise to 40. (I'm not sure if that's Base IC or Available IC though. I suspect it's Available IC, of which I have 39 already!)
The next thing I noticed is how many of the Minister bonuses have changed. For example, most of the Military leaders have a specific Practical/Theory decay at -100%. There's also a new possible minsiter called Nameless Clerk for every single office from every single party. These ministers have the Mostly Harmless trait and don't give any bonuses or penalties, with the notable exception of the Armament Minister always giving +200% Educational System Decay (I don't yet know what that means) and the Chief of the Navy always giving -100% Port Capacity Decay (I'm also not quite sure what that is yet).
I have some recollection of this...
Now this page looks very different from my recent vanilla experience. There is one extra research tab called Operat. (Operational Doctrine) and the layout in the old tabs have changed a lot too. I could probably make an entire chapter about the changes (and I probably will go into some more detail in the next chapter) but I will only cover some basics for now. The aforementioned Educational System and Port Capacity are new types of Practical/Theory introduced for the mod. Educational System (the one that always has +200% decay) seems to represent a general basis of Research. It looks like there are three categories of Techs: applied technologies that benefit from different Practicals/Theories and increase Educational System, theoretical research which benefit from Educational System and increase various Theories, and Doctrines which rely on a doctrine Theory (and various others) and increase the selfsame doctrine Theory. So basically you no longer benefit directly from researching a certain type of tech alone, you also need to invest into the theoretical research (boosted by doing applied research). An interesting approach, though I'm not yet sure if I like it or not. Port Capacity is a component in many of the ship techs to a large degree but I don't yet see how it can be increased. (It will never decay due to the ever-present minister effect.) My guess would be either building Naval Bases (I can't do that yet because I lack the technology) or via event somehow. I remember a system we had back in the day that would limit how far you could advance certain naval techs based on the level of your biggest naval base, this might be an evolution of that concept.
Here are some bullet points on the major changes:
- No more Cavalry Weapons, Militia Weapons, Infantry Weapons. Everyone uses rifles, the same tech upgrades all of your forces except Militia, they get outdated gear as you develop new equipment for your main forces.
- Militia Theory/Practicals are gone entirely.
- Super Heavy tanks are removed (they were a theoretical idea that never really worked in practice), replaced by Infantry Support Tanks (fairly slow moving tanks used as mobile cover and direct fire artillery support for advancing infantry; the basis of the British and French doctrine). Researching Medium Tanks requires the appropriate Doctrine that uses tanks in an independent role.
- Artillery, Anti-Tank and Anti-Air brigades are gone, replaced by a universal Support Brigade; or rather three: a horse-towed version (same speed as Infantry), a truck-towed version (same speed as Motorized Infantry but consumes fuel) and a mechanized version (same speed still but works on a tank chassis with lower softness; Tank-Destroyers are still a separate unit though); techs represent equipment, giving bonuses to any unit using that equipment.
- In several areas there's a "basis" tech that is required to be at a certain tier for any other tech of that area to be researched for that tier. For example, Light Armor Chassis 4 is needed for Light Armor Gun 4, Light Armor Engine 4, etc. This goes for all types of tanks, all types of ships and also single, twin and four engine aircraft.
- The Education tech no longer gives a percentage bonus to Leadership but gives 0.5 Leadership per level via Strategic Effect. It also doesn't benefit from any Theory/Practical and researching ahead of time is very slow.
- Training techs are homogenized and tanks have generally lower Organisation (and gain from tech) than Infantry.
- Land doctrines are entirely reworked into three categories, one mainly concerning Infantry, one mainly for Armour and one mainly for combat tactics and the Combined Arms bonuses. You can only pick one in each category for each tier ('30, '37, '40, '43 and '46) but you can freely pick which to go with for the next tier.
- The recurring year for many techs start earlier now. For example, the 1936 Small Arms tech is level 5 already. This allows for a greater gap between underdeveloped countries and more advanced ones.
As for the starting technological state of Canada, we have reasonably advanced Infantry equipment (with access to regular Infantry, Cavalry and horse-towed Support but nothing more fancy), only the bare minimum in heavy ordenance, absolutely no tanks (except for some basic Armoured Cars), zero capabilities in Ship development, only very basic Aircraft, somewhat outdated Industry (with a good Education though) and rather minimal advances in Doctrines. We have Firepower Focus Concept (increasing the size of our Infantry and Cavalry Regiments), Infantry Support Role Concept (giving some bonuses to the Infantry Support Tanks we don't have) and Grand Battle Plan Concept (mainly building on Assault and Counter-attack and increasing the Combined Arms bonuses from support types but not tanks).
We don't have a lot to work with but it's better than nothing!
The first thing to mention here is the change in Strategic Resources. In vanilla there are a dozen types with some rather weird ones like horses, antibiotics or black soil, each of which are available in 3-4 provinces throughout the World. That system was introduced after I left and while I wasn't against the idea of strategic resources in general, the specific examples felt forced. It seems the then current developers of HPP felt the same way, since they changed all of the available ones. For example, as Canada, I have Antimony (giving +1% Research Efficiency), Uranium (+40% Nuclear Research) and Tungsten (+15% Hard Attack). Looking around a bit, I found that Rubber gives 2.5% IC Efficiency, Gold gives nothing and the rest were removed entirely. (Which has the unfortunate consequence of the 11th page of the Statistics window crashing because the engine references those types I guess.) I also found these Strategic Resources to be extremely abundant, with Uranium being the rarest (appearing in 18 provinces). In fact, Germany starts with 3 out of 4 and will get access to the last one with the annexation of the Sudetenland. I appreciate the effort of finding every instance where these resources could be found and faihtfully putting them on the map but even with the ability to strategically bomb them, they serve no practical purpose like this.
Like I mentioned before, I don't have the ability to build my own ships at all, lacking all the technologies required (except for Convoys). I could build the most basic Great War era Medium Bombers (used to be called Tactical Bombers) and Light Fighters (used to be called Interceptors) and for ground forces, I have access to Cavalry, Garrison, Infantry, Militia and Horse-Towed Support Regiments. Aside from that I could build factories or land fortifications. The currently in-progress coastal guns are probably based on foreign design because I couldn't build them myself.
I know nothing about anything basically
This panel looks the same as in vanilla and I probably won't spend much time here with the limited Leadership I have. But who knows, we will see.
Resource allocation in the North-Eastern USA, Quebec and Ontario
While looking at the Strategic Resources on the map, I also noticed something I've read about in a forum post: the current HPP map is much more decentralized than vanilla. There is a huge difference in scope between Hearts of Iron 2 and 3 with the province sizes being much, much smaller in the later game but I suppose the original dev team didn't put all that much effort into distributing the resources from their older map into the new, "higher resolution" map. This new distribution should allow for more dynamic changes when it comes to moving fronts, resources (and IC) being lost/gained more gradually. Victory Points were also redistributed, based on population and other factors, hopefully for more reasonable results (and also taking into consideration the added releasable nations).
My glorious army!
And here are the defenders of our great nation! A grand total of 3 Divisions (one Infantry, one Militia and one Cavalry), all with a Support Regiment attached (the Mechanized Support Regiment of the 1st Canadian Cavalry Division consists of Armoured Cars which I have developed but can't actually build myself without researching one more tech and I would need the most basic Light Tank Chassis or the most basic Medium Tank Chassis, the later of which actually requires the Light Tank anyway). I also start with 2 Transport Flotillas I can't build, 2 Destroyer Flotillas I can't build and 1 Light Bomber (formerly known as Close Air Support) Wings I can't build. None of these appear to be marked as licensed equipment but they probably are, I don't know. I remember caring very very little about the models and pictures and such back in the day already
I also checked out the Strategic Effects though I didn't take a screenshot of those. I have an Education modifier giving me +4 Leadership based on my current tech level, an extra point of Leadership from being in the Commonwealth (which only applies for my current International Status, if I increase that, I will lose the extra point, giving a net gain of 1 point instead of 2), a bonus to Money (also based on my Education tech), an indirect bonus to Crude Oil production (based on my Oil Refining tech, because techs can't give a bonus to Crude Oil itself...) some bonuses from having a realy high National Unity (90%) and a small penalty to Ruling Party Support because I have Mixed Industry instead of Consumer Product Orientation. There are also two general modifiers to Threat that have no condition: -50% Threat Resistance and +50% Threat Impact. I'm not entirely sure what these do but they are likely required for the fine tuning of some other effects and I guess they are here instead of the base values because either the modifeir type doesn't work there or the developers wanted these to be more visible, I don't know. And last but not least I get a teaser for some modifiers I could get if I had a lot more troops, giving me extra Leadership points but I don't think I will ever have 100 Brigades, 20 Ships or 10 Air Wings. I also don't know what the country flags they require are or where they come from so I won't worry too much about it.
And I almost forgot to check the Introduction and Configuration Settings decisions! The former told me about the game master country (which I invented), the Laws not being strictly better lower down on the list (and the interface not realizing that), the overhauled Leadership concept (which I explained already), manpower and conscription (I didn't go into detail about this but the gist of it is you can trigger an event where you gain a drastic bonus to your Manpower for a limited amount of time, representing mobilization, a system I also invented), land doctrines (I explained this above), naval treaties that don't concern me all that much but limit naval research of the majors, infantry and militia weapons (explained above), resources and storage (another system I invented, the idea being you get a penalty on resource production the more you have in stockpile) and politics (this part is fairly vague and we might not get to see too much of it for a while). And finally, here's the historical background text for Canada:
I really like this idea, I missed the country descriptions form HoI2!
The Configuration Settings are an interesting addition as well! There's a set of Difficulty Settings allowing you to buff Factions separately or the AI in general for example. I won't be using that because I'm interested in the overall ballance. There's a Trade menu that can make the AI stop doing certain things on your behalf like allowing new trades that require you to send convoys to get them, which will then be sunk by your enemies, resulting in lost National Unity! This is a great idea, I love it! (In fact, I would go further and suggest the AI to heavily consider this on its own when trading with others while at war with a strong naval enemy!) There are more options regarding what you want to trade and how much you want to stockpile and also a list of options for Intelligence and the Production. The system is somewhat cumbersome to use but rather ingenious in the use of the limited modding tools! Darkest Hour can do all this via the interface because they had access to the engine!
Anyway, that is how things stand at the start of the game. The next chapter will be about laying some plans for the future for technology, production, maybe politics and also about how we plan to participate in World Affairs as Europe is undoubtedly marching towards another Great War!
