Well, we already have one for screenshots, so I thought I'd post all the text from the Dev Diaries into one thread, so that whoever wishes to can read through all the information we have so far from top to bottom.
Note: If there is some issue with my doing this, Johan (or other Devs) please let me know, I don't want to quote anyone without their consent.
I'll update as quickly as I can after a DD is released
1 - MAP PHILOSOPHY
Hello everybody and welcome to our first development diary for Hearts of Iron 3.
It is two weeks since we showed our first alpha screenshot, and as you all know, we've been busy little bees here, working hard at implementing our designs since then. The focus the last weeks have been on the land combat algoritms, which we will talk about in a few weeks, and on politics and diplomacy.
The Map
Since everyone looks at the map quite a lot when they play our strategy games, I thought it would be a good idea to explain these philosophies in our first diary here. There are two aspects to the map philosophy, style and setup.
Style
When it comes to style, our vision is to create a map that feels like a WW2 map, like it could be a map which upon a commander in the War would be looking at himself. We're going with an almost flat 2d-style, with pale-grey coloring scheme to give that special WW2 feel. I personally feel our artist have managed to move towards that goal rather nicely so far.
Setup
10,000 provinces, the Hearts of Iron 3 map has over 10,000 land provinces. To put this in perspective there were exactly 2608 total provinces in Hearts of Iron 2. We didn’t do this just to add more; we could of added 100, 200 maybe even a 1,000 more provinces and went there you go Hearts of Iron 3 gives you more. In fact when came to set up the number of provinces we had no hard number in mind, 10,000 was just the result. However we knew we wanted a bigger map with more provinces and to do this we had to solve a number of technical problems. However we are rather pleased that we have managed to create a map that is 9 times bigger (the length and breadth have been increased by 3 times) without everyone having to go out and buy the very latest graphics cards. We’ve also achieved this without having to compromise on the modability of the map, for those of you who enjoyed modding or playing mods on the EU3 or Rome map, Hearts of Iron 3 will be able to offer you the same.
With that in mind you are probably asking why did we do it? Well the first reason is that we can give more provinces to areas that didn’t have as many in Hearts of Iron 3. All continents have more provinces now, but we could add more to places that were not as favoured in Hearts of Iron 2. The Asian mainland is a big winner here, the Sino-Japanese war and the War in Burma now have a broader front in which people can plan and manoeuvre. Adding something to these wars.
What we did is to create three size groups of provinces, for ease we will call them small, medium and large. We aimed to make the provinces approximately all the same size inside these groups. This map is not about modelling various administrative regions inside countries but a place for fighting wars.
When it came to placing these provinces small provinces are usually found on coasts (like the east coast of America) and places were there were combat, Europe, large parts of China, South East Asia. The medium sized provinces then appear adjacent to the small provinces, and finally the large provinces are in places that are considered less important, large tracts of Siberia and the inland parts of the Sahara desert come under this category. Essentially the medium sized provinces act as transition provinces between large and small.
So to give you a sense of scale, the Burmese and Manchurian border have had their total number of province roughly tripled. While the Soviet Union’s 1936 border has seen its province total double (note I am not giving out hard numbers at the moment because the map is most definitely not set in stone and we will be seeking to continue to improve it all through development). This is something we really wanted, double the provinces means double the choices of where to attack and doubles the number of spots you have to think about defending. Giving players choices like this is always good; more choices like these means more strategic thought is required.
We also wanted to give combat a more blitzkrieg feeling. With more provinces there is more opportunities for you to carve out armoured breakthroughs and exploitation. Creating opportunities for encirclements or battles of manoeuvre were both sides. Mobile troops attack and counter attack. We are aiming to try and create a canvas were you can practice the operational art.
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2 - PRODUCTION SYSTEM
Hello and welcome to the second development diary for Hearts of Iron 3. It has been a busy week in the development team, with people working on historical decisions and event chains, developing the production interface, and doing work on the political and diplomatical parts of the game. Now it is wednesday again, and as the tradition goes, its a Vindaloo for lunch and then a development diary to write.
This week, I am going to talk about the production system, which is the core of the economics in HoI3. Hearts of Iron is a game focused on re-figthing WW2, where economy matters, but is not the main focus of the game. When we increase complexity in HoI3, it will primarily be at the warfare and logistics part of the game. We are keeping the IC system that was so successful in the previous incarnations of the series, where you decide what you want to produce centrally, and allocate IC on consumer goods, supplies, upgrades, reinforcement and production.
However, some aspects have changed, for what we think will create a much more realistic and balanced gameplay.
First up, we've added efficency as a concept for resource extraction, and for the output of resources per IC. This will create strategic possibilites of improving your industry in certain aspects.
However perhaps the biggest change is to gearing. Rather than having you stick on long production queues that become more efficient over time, a country has a number of practical values representing its accumulated experience in producing certain types of equipment. These decay over time, so to keep yourself up to date you need to keep continually producing equipment of this type. Now a rather interesting consequence of this rule is that let’s say you are Germany, you have focussed all out on land and air units and you have conquered Russia so now you are going to sink all your IC into building ships. You’re production will be initially be much less efficient until your economy reorients towards naval production.
Another interesting thing is that production effects technology, the more of something you produce the easier it is to research in that area. So if you want to advance technology in an area (say carriers) you are going to want to keep producing carriers to pick up the research bonus. Yes no more tech rushing, those early model carriers may not be that good but they will serve as a nice test bed for design ideas.
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3 - TECHNOLOGY SYSTEM I
Hello everybody, and welcome to the 3rd edition of the HoI3 development diaries.
This last week our development team have been working on various concepts like political interfaces, logistics and diplomacy. We've seen plenty of people stay extra hours just because its such a fun part of the development cycle right now.
So today, we'll talk about Technology.As ever let’s start with our philosophy, if we look at the evolution of the tech system in Hearts of Iron series we first of had the in-depth technology system of HoI1, which was practically a game in itself. However it did have several weakness, besides being much micromanagement, there also was no differentiation between the abilities of the countries, research was research and as long as you had the IC you could be good at anything.
With Hearts of Iron 2 we brought in the tech team, this gave us country specialisations; Germany was good at certain things, the US good at others. Which was good, however its weakness was that these were hard coded, Germany could never be good at aircraft carriers no matter how hard it tried, and the US would always be good at aircraft carriers no matter how little effort it put in. Also with the more streamlined system we also lost the ability to differentiate between the technology focuses of countries more. Our goals were three parts, keep the clarity of the Hearts of Iron 2 system, make the system more dynamic in that your technology abilities would evolve and try to bring back in as much of the different units that the Hearts of Iron system offered.
The sad result is that tech teams could not feature in our new system. We liked them, we really wanted to keep them but just couldn’t find a way to accommodate them in the system. What we have replaced them with are various theory and practical values representing the accumulated research knowledge and practical experience a country has in various fields. These can be defined for a country at the start, thus giving us the initial specialisations that the tech teams in Hearts of Iron 2 offered, but as these values increase and decay according to what a country is doing. Thus we have a system that dynamically evolved according to how you decide to steer the country. As was mentioned in the previous dev dairy practical values are gained from building things while theoretical knowledge is gained from research. In general practical experience gives larger bonuses than theoretical. If take the Soviet Union as an example here, the Soviet union will be set up with it theoretical and practical experience in areas like tanks, with very little in naval. However if the player wishes (foolishly some would say) to turn the Soviet Union into a naval power by putting more production and research focus into ships they are free to do so. The more the do so the better the Soviet Union will become at building and researching ships. But at the cost of steadily loses its abilities in fields like armour.
As a general rule, there are of course exceptions, theoretical bonuses tend to cover a wide spread of technologies while the practical bonuses are more specific. To give an example we have a broad theory aeronautic engineering, that covers the majority of aircraft techs as a theory, however practical is divided up into 3 narrower categories, single engine (FTR, INT & CAS), twin engine (TAC & NAV) and four engine (STR & TRS). We also have the ability that one technology can give bonuses to as many unit types as we like. So for aircraft, you can have very general techs like aircraft engine that boost all aircraft (yes you can but a Merlin Engine on your Lancaster bomber), practical group techs like single engine airframe (these improve FTR, INT & CAS) and finally highly focuses techs like air launched anti ship weapons that only improve NAV (this tech also gains bonuses for accumulate naval research experience). I think about now I should mention that all these aspects are of course fully modable.
What should also have noticed here that we no longer have models, instead we have technologies that increase the maximum values a unit can have and if unit can upgrade to these values it will. This allows us to do really nice things like divide up what would be a single technology that gave in a model in Hearts of Iron 2 in several separate techs. So if we take tanks here as example, you can separately research a tank gun, tank engine, tank armour and tank reliability (just for the record reliability effects the ability for the tank unit to withstand damage on the attack, unreliable tanks tend to break down). How we set these values can give a countries tanks brigades with different values with out the straight jacket of the nation specific unit. Take the early war British heavy tank brigade, well armoured, slow, under gunned and prone to breakdowns. We can create this effect through out technology system, but also giving the player the freedom to steer his country the way he wishes.
There are of course exceptions to the theoretical and practical rules. One of these is land doctrine’s. Here the theory is focuses in on specific doctrine paths, while the practical, which is gained from more general combat, covers all of them. So in the pre-war countries will be at the more efficient researching inside their area of doctrine expertise but you gain new experience from combat continues will able to ‘steal’ doctrine ideas from other countries.
Finally how is research done? It is no longer tied to IC, nor does it use techteams. Stay tuned next week for how this all ties together.
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4 - LEADERSHIP
Hello, and welcome back to the weekly HoI3 development diary.
It has been another week of interesting development at the project, and we continued with development of the core of politics, diplomacy and logistics. The interfaces is starting to come together, and we hope to soon be able to show you some of them.
Rather evilly we left you with a bit of cliffhanger last week, the answer to the question how do you do research? This week we introduce the concept of leadership; this represent educated people who live in your country. They are used for research, diplomacy, espionage and your officer corps.
Before going into more detail let’s talk a little about our philosophy. It all comes down to what we feel makes for good strategy. Strategy demands clear-cut long-term choices. Our goal is that you the player should be weighing up your options carefully and not just be reacting to short term considerations. If you want to go all out on research you should be able to do so, however as with real life there should also be a price to pay.
In later developer diaries you will hear more about diplomacy and espionage and how we plan to achieve our goal of making you plan your investment in these areas for the long term. At the moment we will say that the amount of leadership points invested in these areas acts as a cap on how much you can do. The focus of this dev diary will be party on technology and partly on officers.
As mentioned at the top of diary leadership is your educated people. These aren’t just the top the university graduates, in fact it is the exact opposite. If we look at the Manhattan project there were over 130,000 people working on it and not all of these went onto to win a Nobel Prize for Physics. All research projects in our time frame relied on these support people to make them happen, and this is Leadership. The top graduates are represented by your nations accumulated theory value and can only give you benefits for projects where their skills apply, while the clerks, secretaries, draftsmen, chemists, physics etc. who are the unsung heroes of wartime research, they can work anywhere.
In order to make our task of game balance easier these leadership points are consumed when you do research. We do acknowledge that the people you assign to projects will become steadily more experienced and don’t just disappear and this is also held as your accumulated theory value. The more you research in an area the less leadership points you will need to advance in a field. Similarly for practical values, having a number of tanks to work with already means you need to expend less effort to advance in a field.
I also mention the officer corps, to put your minds at rest the divisional level and above leaders you had in Hearts of Iron and Hearts of Iron 2 are still there. These represent the Officers and NCOs below divisional rank. These are the men supplied the glue that held your divisions together. As you invest more in leadership your divisions can take more punishment. Taking casualties, building more troops, plus the occasional officer purge will mean your units will fall apart more easily in combat.
I mentioned earlier that I would explain what the little flag at the top of the screen is for. Well, as you now most likely have guessed, its the indicator of your leadership.
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5 - LAND COMBAT I
Hello, and welcome to the fifth chapter of the Hearts of Iron 3 development diary. We’ve had yet another busy week, developing lots of interesting things for the game. Today we’ll talk about basics of the land combat system in HoI3.
Land combat, in our opinion, forms the centrepiece of Hearts of Iron 3; the whole game revolves around your ability to take provinces from other countries. Thus combat was an area we put a lot of thought into and the basic system was one of the first game features we coded in. Our overall goal was to take what was an already good combat system and make it better.
First up, move is still attack. It worked in Hearts of Iron 2 and we felt no reason to change to this basic system. However what we have done is that if you are fighting you suffer a movement penalty. Which can be increased or decreased according to combat events. Now using small units to try and delay an enemy is an option. However due to the unpredictability of combat you don’t know in advance how successful they will be.
The next thing we looked at was the legendary super stack, and we made sure that now it is no longer any guarantee to success, not to say it might not have its place. What we have added is a maximum attack frontage, per attacking province, you can imagine it feeling a bit like the EU3 or EU:Rome battle screen. There is now only a finite number of units that can attack or defend on a single province border. First, as you no doubt remember, we actually have several sizes of provinces. We have assumed that all provinces are the same for attack frontage purposes. We justify this assumption on the grounds that these large provinces are usually in the places in the world that are remote and have hostile terrain so even though the borders are technically larger the terrain is such that you cannot use this extra space to bring more units into combat.
So what does this mean, first off if you cannot fill your whole frontage you suffer a force to space ratio penalty. From the point of view of an attacker the more provinces you attack from the more likely you are to stretch the defenders and force them to thin out their lines. This means that multiple attacks are good, but you can’t just throw in a single division and pick up a nice bonus, you really need to attack with numbers on each axis.
The next question is how much space does a unit take up? Well this depends on the unit composition of the division, the more brigades a division has the more frontage it will take up. It also depends on doctrines. For example the Blitzkrieg path gives you the ability to narrow the frontage of armoured units, making them more effective. Finally terrain also affects the frontage, when crossing a river or making a seaborne landing it is much harder to bring your massed troops to bear as compared to nice open terrain.
Onto the next question, what happens to the extra units? They sit in reserve, should a unit drop out of the front lines there is a chance, modified by things like doctrines, that it will join the combat. Should you run out of troops on the front line then regardless of the number of reserves you may have your troops still has to retreat.
To sum up a large stack is no guarantee of victory, not all these units will be able to fight and there is a chance that not all of them will even get a chance to fight. Combat should become much more unpredictable, and quality should be as important as quantity. You might blitz your enemy or you might end up in a grinding attritional fight that drags on, the goal is to remove the I win option out of combat and make your strategy much more important than the size of the stacks, because the people on the home front want victory not super stacks.
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6 - POLITICS
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.
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7 - DIVISION DESIGNER
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.
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8 - UNIT HIERARCHY
Hello, and welcome to the eight chapter of the HoI3 developer diary. This last week has been as busy as usual, with plenty of progress on naval combat, map design, orders & espionage.
Well last week we talked a bit about the division design system and promised you a bit more about land units. First off I suppose we start with the basic philosophy. We felt that the Heart of Iron 2 Division as a concept worked and worked well. So the division as an operation unit has not gone under any radical changes. Instead we have sought to improve the environment in which the division operates-
In previous developer diaries we talked about the additional provinces we added to make the combat more fluid, the frontage system to make combat more than the biggest stack and the division design system to make divisions more unique. So what else could we add to divisions?
However to add some much needed suspense and drama to this developer diary first we must diverge. As promised we will first give you a quick run through of what the symbols were in the previous developer diary. Although before we do that a quick health warning, these are alpha screen shots the numbers you see are purely place holders. So don’t try to read too much into them.
So running from left to right you see of course Strength and Organisation. The next one is a new concept of combat width. Then we have the three attack values; soft, hard and air attack. Then the three defensive values; when you are on the defence, on the attack and air defence. The next one is unsurprisingly the speed of the unit. Then we have suppression value. The next two are supply and fuel consumption. Then we have IC cost, manpower cost and time.
Most of these concepts are very familiar to those of you who played the previous incarnations of Hearts of Iron so you are probably wondering what we did add? As we mentioned in the presentation in Leipzig, we have added a command structure. Divisions now fit into a multilevel command structure. From Theatre, Army Group, Army, Corps through to Division. Each level has its own commander that gives its own bonus according to his skill level. At division level you get a bonus to combat while a corps commander increases the chances of reserves joining combat. Our goal is to leave you wanting good commanders at each level thus leaving you to think about should you promote that Major General to a Lieutenant General and give him command of a corps? At every position in the command structure, you can insert a leader of the designated rank.
Another important aspect of this is the fact that every division is its own unit on the map, and so is every HQ above it. Now you may think that this will increase micromanagement? Well, we have some pretty interesting plans on how to handle unit orders.
Well, having almost finished with land units, one thing left is what are we doing about supply. Maybe that should be next week’s dev diary?
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9 - LOGISTICS
Probably the truest maxim in war is that amateurs study tactics and professionals study logistics. When coming to do a game of the scope of Hearts of Iron 3 we knew that logistics would have to be one of the key constraints on your actions. However at the same time we aren’t making World War II Logistics Manager: Deliver Shells for the Fatherland, so although it should be important we felt that it should not be the be all and end all of the game.
[Just a note on terminology here, we have fuel and supplies. However through out this developer diary I am simply going to refer to both of them together as supplies.]
With this philosophy in mind we have totally rewritten the logistics system, there is no longer TC. Instead supplies move from your capital out to your units. The amount of infrastructure in a province acts as a limit to the amount of supplies you can move. The supplies advance on a daily basis. In addition there is a supply tax, the further your unit is from its supply source the more supplies it consumes. After all, supplies don’t move themselves; you are going to need people to move them, who in turn also consume supplies. In addition each unit carriers a small amount of supplies with them, if they cannot draw supply they will start to consume these instead. Like Hearts of Iron 2 if a unit is abroad it will have a supply stockpile point that acts as a base for its supply. However there is one additional factor, when convoying supplies abroad the maximum amount of supplies you can send is limited by the size of port. The bigger the port the more supplies you can ship in. The control of ports is very important if you wish to wage campaigns overseas.
So let’s talk a little about what this means in practice. First off, and sticking with our design philosophy, the actual nuts and bolts of delivering supplies to your units is automated. From the player perspective, logistics is something you work with not something you have to constantly manage.
When it comes to the actual supply itself the most important thing to remember is that supply lags, how many supplies a province asks for is based on how many it needed yesterday. Thus your ability to simply mass units for an offensive is limited by the fact that it will take time for your supply network to adjust. Since this request then needs to ripple back down through the supply network, you need time to prepare your troops for an offensive. This in turn gives the enemy a better chance to detect and prepare for it via intelligence. Also, coming back to that recurring theme of the superstack, with it now being possible to only deliver a finite amount of supplies you can no longer stack unlimited units in a province, especially not one sitting out in the middle of no where.
When advancing you start to devastate the infrastructure, dramatically reducing the amount of supplies a province can draw. Although given time infrastructure will recover, in the mean time the unit will start living off the supplies it is carrying. Sooner or later you are going to have to halt to allow your supply lines to catch up. When defending since your units have supplies and each province also has supplies, it means if your units are encircled they are no longer just simply out of supply; they will have a number of supplies inside the pocket allowing them to fight on for a while.
This system also puts new life into the logistical strike mission. Bombing infrastructure behind enemy lines will reduce the capacity of their supply network. Making it harder to keep their units at full fighting efficiency. Logistical strike missions can assist either the attacker or the defender, because troops always need supplies.
Technology is also your friend here. One of the logistics techs you can research will improve the number of supplies you can draw per level of infrastructure. So as you improve in this area which choice do you take? Do you use your improved supply capacity to put more units into the front lines to improve your punch on the offensive, or do you use the same number of units but with your improved draw ability sustain the advance that little bit longer? Well that’s what strategy is all about, the choices you are faced with.
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10 - NAVAL UNITS
Welcome to the 10th chapter of the development diary. This is the final development diary before the holidays, and we’ll be back in the middle of January.
Today, I’d like to talk about the naval aspect of the game, which one of the focus we’ve had in the last few weeks.
When we went off to think about the Naval system we had two real thoughts. Firstly that the ship model system was particularly unsatisfactory solution when you consider the diversity of ships that were designed and built in World War II. Secondly that overall you had two types of naval orders, those you really wanted to get organised and let run and those that you wanted to focus you time on planning.
First off, let’s talk about the model system. We’ve already talked about it a little but I feel it really comes into its own with ships. If you compare the Hood and Scharnhorst, in Hearts of Iron 2 the Scharnhorst is the superior ship in all aspects, as it is a model 4 battle cruiser while the Hood is only a model 3battle cruiser. However with the Hearts of Iron 3 system we can do a very neat trick. The Hood is a large ship with 15’’ guns and a lot of Anti-Aircraft batteries, however its design is pre-Jutland and thus it had a known vulnerability to plunging fire. The Scharnhorst is much faster, better armoured ship, but only carries 11’’ guns. We can now simulate this; the Hood is defined with much better armament and anti-aircraft values, while the Scharnhorst scores better in engine and armour values. Different ship designs can be different, and naturally these are all modable.
We have also scraped the naval attachment system all together and instead we have defined each individual technology to be upgradeable or not (surprisingly this is also fully modable). For ships it means you can partially upgrade old ships. If you build a ship its main gun armament is fixed for all time, however its anti-aircraft batteries are very much upgradeable. We feel this system sets up the right blend of newer ships being better than older ships without the old ships simply being useless.
Next to Naval orders. We’ve made a couple of changes to naval orders. Firstly we have added the infinite order, for something like convoy escorts, you send you fleet out and the order will run indefinitely. With an added twist, each naval base can also be set up with a pool of reserves. These sit in port, repair if they need it, upgrade if they can, but when ever a fleet that is on an infinite order needs to return to port these ships will be used to replace them (providing they are of the same type). Thus if your ships, have low org, or are damaged, rather than having to go to all the trouble of sending a different fleet out on exactly the same order the system will take care of this automatically. What we’ve tried to do is hold down the planning overhead for your missions, yes you may want to go back from time to time and adjust them, but as long as things are going ok you can leave your naval units to get on with it.
Thus you now have extra time plan your naval big naval operations, like sending out the Bismarck to go convoy raiding in the Atlantic. To help facilitate this we’ve added a cool new feature, multiple detection levels. Knowing an enemy fleet is in a sea zone is not enough to be able to engage it, the ocean is a big place and all you know is that a fleet is somewhere. You need to pinpoint the fleet’s location better than that if you wish to actually fight it. First up we have added a patrol order (best suited for light ships), these ships will search sea zones in its area of operation looking for enemies, if an enemy fleet is partially detected it will focus its search in that sea zone. Once the patrolling ships find an enemy they don’t seek to engage (unless the odds are very good), instead they will try to trail the enemy, keeping it in contact until heavier ships come along to help out. Note the trailed ship has a chance of detecting its shadow and trying to sink it before help can arrive. The final piece of the puzzle is the naval intercept order, this is for your big fleet, and they sit in port waiting for the enemy to be found by your patrol ships. As soon as the enemy is positively identified and they like the odds (which you determine) they will sail off and try and sink them.
I suppose at this point I should mention that the system as detailed above is an optional extra. You can still manually move ships about, set ships onto short timed orders, you do not have to assign reserves. It is up to you to determine how much of the naval war you want to manage.
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Note: If there is some issue with my doing this, Johan (or other Devs) please let me know, I don't want to quote anyone without their consent.
I'll update as quickly as I can after a DD is released
1 - MAP PHILOSOPHY
Hello everybody and welcome to our first development diary for Hearts of Iron 3.
It is two weeks since we showed our first alpha screenshot, and as you all know, we've been busy little bees here, working hard at implementing our designs since then. The focus the last weeks have been on the land combat algoritms, which we will talk about in a few weeks, and on politics and diplomacy.
The Map
Since everyone looks at the map quite a lot when they play our strategy games, I thought it would be a good idea to explain these philosophies in our first diary here. There are two aspects to the map philosophy, style and setup.
Style
When it comes to style, our vision is to create a map that feels like a WW2 map, like it could be a map which upon a commander in the War would be looking at himself. We're going with an almost flat 2d-style, with pale-grey coloring scheme to give that special WW2 feel. I personally feel our artist have managed to move towards that goal rather nicely so far.
Setup
10,000 provinces, the Hearts of Iron 3 map has over 10,000 land provinces. To put this in perspective there were exactly 2608 total provinces in Hearts of Iron 2. We didn’t do this just to add more; we could of added 100, 200 maybe even a 1,000 more provinces and went there you go Hearts of Iron 3 gives you more. In fact when came to set up the number of provinces we had no hard number in mind, 10,000 was just the result. However we knew we wanted a bigger map with more provinces and to do this we had to solve a number of technical problems. However we are rather pleased that we have managed to create a map that is 9 times bigger (the length and breadth have been increased by 3 times) without everyone having to go out and buy the very latest graphics cards. We’ve also achieved this without having to compromise on the modability of the map, for those of you who enjoyed modding or playing mods on the EU3 or Rome map, Hearts of Iron 3 will be able to offer you the same.
With that in mind you are probably asking why did we do it? Well the first reason is that we can give more provinces to areas that didn’t have as many in Hearts of Iron 3. All continents have more provinces now, but we could add more to places that were not as favoured in Hearts of Iron 2. The Asian mainland is a big winner here, the Sino-Japanese war and the War in Burma now have a broader front in which people can plan and manoeuvre. Adding something to these wars.
What we did is to create three size groups of provinces, for ease we will call them small, medium and large. We aimed to make the provinces approximately all the same size inside these groups. This map is not about modelling various administrative regions inside countries but a place for fighting wars.
When it came to placing these provinces small provinces are usually found on coasts (like the east coast of America) and places were there were combat, Europe, large parts of China, South East Asia. The medium sized provinces then appear adjacent to the small provinces, and finally the large provinces are in places that are considered less important, large tracts of Siberia and the inland parts of the Sahara desert come under this category. Essentially the medium sized provinces act as transition provinces between large and small.
So to give you a sense of scale, the Burmese and Manchurian border have had their total number of province roughly tripled. While the Soviet Union’s 1936 border has seen its province total double (note I am not giving out hard numbers at the moment because the map is most definitely not set in stone and we will be seeking to continue to improve it all through development). This is something we really wanted, double the provinces means double the choices of where to attack and doubles the number of spots you have to think about defending. Giving players choices like this is always good; more choices like these means more strategic thought is required.
We also wanted to give combat a more blitzkrieg feeling. With more provinces there is more opportunities for you to carve out armoured breakthroughs and exploitation. Creating opportunities for encirclements or battles of manoeuvre were both sides. Mobile troops attack and counter attack. We are aiming to try and create a canvas were you can practice the operational art.
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2 - PRODUCTION SYSTEM
Hello and welcome to the second development diary for Hearts of Iron 3. It has been a busy week in the development team, with people working on historical decisions and event chains, developing the production interface, and doing work on the political and diplomatical parts of the game. Now it is wednesday again, and as the tradition goes, its a Vindaloo for lunch and then a development diary to write.
This week, I am going to talk about the production system, which is the core of the economics in HoI3. Hearts of Iron is a game focused on re-figthing WW2, where economy matters, but is not the main focus of the game. When we increase complexity in HoI3, it will primarily be at the warfare and logistics part of the game. We are keeping the IC system that was so successful in the previous incarnations of the series, where you decide what you want to produce centrally, and allocate IC on consumer goods, supplies, upgrades, reinforcement and production.
However, some aspects have changed, for what we think will create a much more realistic and balanced gameplay.
First up, we've added efficency as a concept for resource extraction, and for the output of resources per IC. This will create strategic possibilites of improving your industry in certain aspects.
However perhaps the biggest change is to gearing. Rather than having you stick on long production queues that become more efficient over time, a country has a number of practical values representing its accumulated experience in producing certain types of equipment. These decay over time, so to keep yourself up to date you need to keep continually producing equipment of this type. Now a rather interesting consequence of this rule is that let’s say you are Germany, you have focussed all out on land and air units and you have conquered Russia so now you are going to sink all your IC into building ships. You’re production will be initially be much less efficient until your economy reorients towards naval production.
Another interesting thing is that production effects technology, the more of something you produce the easier it is to research in that area. So if you want to advance technology in an area (say carriers) you are going to want to keep producing carriers to pick up the research bonus. Yes no more tech rushing, those early model carriers may not be that good but they will serve as a nice test bed for design ideas.
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3 - TECHNOLOGY SYSTEM I
Hello everybody, and welcome to the 3rd edition of the HoI3 development diaries.
This last week our development team have been working on various concepts like political interfaces, logistics and diplomacy. We've seen plenty of people stay extra hours just because its such a fun part of the development cycle right now.
So today, we'll talk about Technology.As ever let’s start with our philosophy, if we look at the evolution of the tech system in Hearts of Iron series we first of had the in-depth technology system of HoI1, which was practically a game in itself. However it did have several weakness, besides being much micromanagement, there also was no differentiation between the abilities of the countries, research was research and as long as you had the IC you could be good at anything.
With Hearts of Iron 2 we brought in the tech team, this gave us country specialisations; Germany was good at certain things, the US good at others. Which was good, however its weakness was that these were hard coded, Germany could never be good at aircraft carriers no matter how hard it tried, and the US would always be good at aircraft carriers no matter how little effort it put in. Also with the more streamlined system we also lost the ability to differentiate between the technology focuses of countries more. Our goals were three parts, keep the clarity of the Hearts of Iron 2 system, make the system more dynamic in that your technology abilities would evolve and try to bring back in as much of the different units that the Hearts of Iron system offered.
The sad result is that tech teams could not feature in our new system. We liked them, we really wanted to keep them but just couldn’t find a way to accommodate them in the system. What we have replaced them with are various theory and practical values representing the accumulated research knowledge and practical experience a country has in various fields. These can be defined for a country at the start, thus giving us the initial specialisations that the tech teams in Hearts of Iron 2 offered, but as these values increase and decay according to what a country is doing. Thus we have a system that dynamically evolved according to how you decide to steer the country. As was mentioned in the previous dev dairy practical values are gained from building things while theoretical knowledge is gained from research. In general practical experience gives larger bonuses than theoretical. If take the Soviet Union as an example here, the Soviet union will be set up with it theoretical and practical experience in areas like tanks, with very little in naval. However if the player wishes (foolishly some would say) to turn the Soviet Union into a naval power by putting more production and research focus into ships they are free to do so. The more the do so the better the Soviet Union will become at building and researching ships. But at the cost of steadily loses its abilities in fields like armour.
As a general rule, there are of course exceptions, theoretical bonuses tend to cover a wide spread of technologies while the practical bonuses are more specific. To give an example we have a broad theory aeronautic engineering, that covers the majority of aircraft techs as a theory, however practical is divided up into 3 narrower categories, single engine (FTR, INT & CAS), twin engine (TAC & NAV) and four engine (STR & TRS). We also have the ability that one technology can give bonuses to as many unit types as we like. So for aircraft, you can have very general techs like aircraft engine that boost all aircraft (yes you can but a Merlin Engine on your Lancaster bomber), practical group techs like single engine airframe (these improve FTR, INT & CAS) and finally highly focuses techs like air launched anti ship weapons that only improve NAV (this tech also gains bonuses for accumulate naval research experience). I think about now I should mention that all these aspects are of course fully modable.
What should also have noticed here that we no longer have models, instead we have technologies that increase the maximum values a unit can have and if unit can upgrade to these values it will. This allows us to do really nice things like divide up what would be a single technology that gave in a model in Hearts of Iron 2 in several separate techs. So if we take tanks here as example, you can separately research a tank gun, tank engine, tank armour and tank reliability (just for the record reliability effects the ability for the tank unit to withstand damage on the attack, unreliable tanks tend to break down). How we set these values can give a countries tanks brigades with different values with out the straight jacket of the nation specific unit. Take the early war British heavy tank brigade, well armoured, slow, under gunned and prone to breakdowns. We can create this effect through out technology system, but also giving the player the freedom to steer his country the way he wishes.
There are of course exceptions to the theoretical and practical rules. One of these is land doctrine’s. Here the theory is focuses in on specific doctrine paths, while the practical, which is gained from more general combat, covers all of them. So in the pre-war countries will be at the more efficient researching inside their area of doctrine expertise but you gain new experience from combat continues will able to ‘steal’ doctrine ideas from other countries.
Finally how is research done? It is no longer tied to IC, nor does it use techteams. Stay tuned next week for how this all ties together.
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4 - LEADERSHIP
Hello, and welcome back to the weekly HoI3 development diary.
It has been another week of interesting development at the project, and we continued with development of the core of politics, diplomacy and logistics. The interfaces is starting to come together, and we hope to soon be able to show you some of them.
Rather evilly we left you with a bit of cliffhanger last week, the answer to the question how do you do research? This week we introduce the concept of leadership; this represent educated people who live in your country. They are used for research, diplomacy, espionage and your officer corps.
Before going into more detail let’s talk a little about our philosophy. It all comes down to what we feel makes for good strategy. Strategy demands clear-cut long-term choices. Our goal is that you the player should be weighing up your options carefully and not just be reacting to short term considerations. If you want to go all out on research you should be able to do so, however as with real life there should also be a price to pay.
In later developer diaries you will hear more about diplomacy and espionage and how we plan to achieve our goal of making you plan your investment in these areas for the long term. At the moment we will say that the amount of leadership points invested in these areas acts as a cap on how much you can do. The focus of this dev diary will be party on technology and partly on officers.
As mentioned at the top of diary leadership is your educated people. These aren’t just the top the university graduates, in fact it is the exact opposite. If we look at the Manhattan project there were over 130,000 people working on it and not all of these went onto to win a Nobel Prize for Physics. All research projects in our time frame relied on these support people to make them happen, and this is Leadership. The top graduates are represented by your nations accumulated theory value and can only give you benefits for projects where their skills apply, while the clerks, secretaries, draftsmen, chemists, physics etc. who are the unsung heroes of wartime research, they can work anywhere.
In order to make our task of game balance easier these leadership points are consumed when you do research. We do acknowledge that the people you assign to projects will become steadily more experienced and don’t just disappear and this is also held as your accumulated theory value. The more you research in an area the less leadership points you will need to advance in a field. Similarly for practical values, having a number of tanks to work with already means you need to expend less effort to advance in a field.
I also mention the officer corps, to put your minds at rest the divisional level and above leaders you had in Hearts of Iron and Hearts of Iron 2 are still there. These represent the Officers and NCOs below divisional rank. These are the men supplied the glue that held your divisions together. As you invest more in leadership your divisions can take more punishment. Taking casualties, building more troops, plus the occasional officer purge will mean your units will fall apart more easily in combat.
I mentioned earlier that I would explain what the little flag at the top of the screen is for. Well, as you now most likely have guessed, its the indicator of your leadership.
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5 - LAND COMBAT I
Hello, and welcome to the fifth chapter of the Hearts of Iron 3 development diary. We’ve had yet another busy week, developing lots of interesting things for the game. Today we’ll talk about basics of the land combat system in HoI3.
Land combat, in our opinion, forms the centrepiece of Hearts of Iron 3; the whole game revolves around your ability to take provinces from other countries. Thus combat was an area we put a lot of thought into and the basic system was one of the first game features we coded in. Our overall goal was to take what was an already good combat system and make it better.
First up, move is still attack. It worked in Hearts of Iron 2 and we felt no reason to change to this basic system. However what we have done is that if you are fighting you suffer a movement penalty. Which can be increased or decreased according to combat events. Now using small units to try and delay an enemy is an option. However due to the unpredictability of combat you don’t know in advance how successful they will be.
The next thing we looked at was the legendary super stack, and we made sure that now it is no longer any guarantee to success, not to say it might not have its place. What we have added is a maximum attack frontage, per attacking province, you can imagine it feeling a bit like the EU3 or EU:Rome battle screen. There is now only a finite number of units that can attack or defend on a single province border. First, as you no doubt remember, we actually have several sizes of provinces. We have assumed that all provinces are the same for attack frontage purposes. We justify this assumption on the grounds that these large provinces are usually in the places in the world that are remote and have hostile terrain so even though the borders are technically larger the terrain is such that you cannot use this extra space to bring more units into combat.
So what does this mean, first off if you cannot fill your whole frontage you suffer a force to space ratio penalty. From the point of view of an attacker the more provinces you attack from the more likely you are to stretch the defenders and force them to thin out their lines. This means that multiple attacks are good, but you can’t just throw in a single division and pick up a nice bonus, you really need to attack with numbers on each axis.
The next question is how much space does a unit take up? Well this depends on the unit composition of the division, the more brigades a division has the more frontage it will take up. It also depends on doctrines. For example the Blitzkrieg path gives you the ability to narrow the frontage of armoured units, making them more effective. Finally terrain also affects the frontage, when crossing a river or making a seaborne landing it is much harder to bring your massed troops to bear as compared to nice open terrain.
Onto the next question, what happens to the extra units? They sit in reserve, should a unit drop out of the front lines there is a chance, modified by things like doctrines, that it will join the combat. Should you run out of troops on the front line then regardless of the number of reserves you may have your troops still has to retreat.
To sum up a large stack is no guarantee of victory, not all these units will be able to fight and there is a chance that not all of them will even get a chance to fight. Combat should become much more unpredictable, and quality should be as important as quantity. You might blitz your enemy or you might end up in a grinding attritional fight that drags on, the goal is to remove the I win option out of combat and make your strategy much more important than the size of the stacks, because the people on the home front want victory not super stacks.
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6 - POLITICS
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.
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7 - DIVISION DESIGNER
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.
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8 - UNIT HIERARCHY
Hello, and welcome to the eight chapter of the HoI3 developer diary. This last week has been as busy as usual, with plenty of progress on naval combat, map design, orders & espionage.
Well last week we talked a bit about the division design system and promised you a bit more about land units. First off I suppose we start with the basic philosophy. We felt that the Heart of Iron 2 Division as a concept worked and worked well. So the division as an operation unit has not gone under any radical changes. Instead we have sought to improve the environment in which the division operates-
In previous developer diaries we talked about the additional provinces we added to make the combat more fluid, the frontage system to make combat more than the biggest stack and the division design system to make divisions more unique. So what else could we add to divisions?
However to add some much needed suspense and drama to this developer diary first we must diverge. As promised we will first give you a quick run through of what the symbols were in the previous developer diary. Although before we do that a quick health warning, these are alpha screen shots the numbers you see are purely place holders. So don’t try to read too much into them.
So running from left to right you see of course Strength and Organisation. The next one is a new concept of combat width. Then we have the three attack values; soft, hard and air attack. Then the three defensive values; when you are on the defence, on the attack and air defence. The next one is unsurprisingly the speed of the unit. Then we have suppression value. The next two are supply and fuel consumption. Then we have IC cost, manpower cost and time.
Most of these concepts are very familiar to those of you who played the previous incarnations of Hearts of Iron so you are probably wondering what we did add? As we mentioned in the presentation in Leipzig, we have added a command structure. Divisions now fit into a multilevel command structure. From Theatre, Army Group, Army, Corps through to Division. Each level has its own commander that gives its own bonus according to his skill level. At division level you get a bonus to combat while a corps commander increases the chances of reserves joining combat. Our goal is to leave you wanting good commanders at each level thus leaving you to think about should you promote that Major General to a Lieutenant General and give him command of a corps? At every position in the command structure, you can insert a leader of the designated rank.
Another important aspect of this is the fact that every division is its own unit on the map, and so is every HQ above it. Now you may think that this will increase micromanagement? Well, we have some pretty interesting plans on how to handle unit orders.
Well, having almost finished with land units, one thing left is what are we doing about supply. Maybe that should be next week’s dev diary?
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9 - LOGISTICS
Probably the truest maxim in war is that amateurs study tactics and professionals study logistics. When coming to do a game of the scope of Hearts of Iron 3 we knew that logistics would have to be one of the key constraints on your actions. However at the same time we aren’t making World War II Logistics Manager: Deliver Shells for the Fatherland, so although it should be important we felt that it should not be the be all and end all of the game.
[Just a note on terminology here, we have fuel and supplies. However through out this developer diary I am simply going to refer to both of them together as supplies.]
With this philosophy in mind we have totally rewritten the logistics system, there is no longer TC. Instead supplies move from your capital out to your units. The amount of infrastructure in a province acts as a limit to the amount of supplies you can move. The supplies advance on a daily basis. In addition there is a supply tax, the further your unit is from its supply source the more supplies it consumes. After all, supplies don’t move themselves; you are going to need people to move them, who in turn also consume supplies. In addition each unit carriers a small amount of supplies with them, if they cannot draw supply they will start to consume these instead. Like Hearts of Iron 2 if a unit is abroad it will have a supply stockpile point that acts as a base for its supply. However there is one additional factor, when convoying supplies abroad the maximum amount of supplies you can send is limited by the size of port. The bigger the port the more supplies you can ship in. The control of ports is very important if you wish to wage campaigns overseas.
So let’s talk a little about what this means in practice. First off, and sticking with our design philosophy, the actual nuts and bolts of delivering supplies to your units is automated. From the player perspective, logistics is something you work with not something you have to constantly manage.
When it comes to the actual supply itself the most important thing to remember is that supply lags, how many supplies a province asks for is based on how many it needed yesterday. Thus your ability to simply mass units for an offensive is limited by the fact that it will take time for your supply network to adjust. Since this request then needs to ripple back down through the supply network, you need time to prepare your troops for an offensive. This in turn gives the enemy a better chance to detect and prepare for it via intelligence. Also, coming back to that recurring theme of the superstack, with it now being possible to only deliver a finite amount of supplies you can no longer stack unlimited units in a province, especially not one sitting out in the middle of no where.
When advancing you start to devastate the infrastructure, dramatically reducing the amount of supplies a province can draw. Although given time infrastructure will recover, in the mean time the unit will start living off the supplies it is carrying. Sooner or later you are going to have to halt to allow your supply lines to catch up. When defending since your units have supplies and each province also has supplies, it means if your units are encircled they are no longer just simply out of supply; they will have a number of supplies inside the pocket allowing them to fight on for a while.
This system also puts new life into the logistical strike mission. Bombing infrastructure behind enemy lines will reduce the capacity of their supply network. Making it harder to keep their units at full fighting efficiency. Logistical strike missions can assist either the attacker or the defender, because troops always need supplies.
Technology is also your friend here. One of the logistics techs you can research will improve the number of supplies you can draw per level of infrastructure. So as you improve in this area which choice do you take? Do you use your improved supply capacity to put more units into the front lines to improve your punch on the offensive, or do you use the same number of units but with your improved draw ability sustain the advance that little bit longer? Well that’s what strategy is all about, the choices you are faced with.
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10 - NAVAL UNITS
Welcome to the 10th chapter of the development diary. This is the final development diary before the holidays, and we’ll be back in the middle of January.
Today, I’d like to talk about the naval aspect of the game, which one of the focus we’ve had in the last few weeks.
When we went off to think about the Naval system we had two real thoughts. Firstly that the ship model system was particularly unsatisfactory solution when you consider the diversity of ships that were designed and built in World War II. Secondly that overall you had two types of naval orders, those you really wanted to get organised and let run and those that you wanted to focus you time on planning.
First off, let’s talk about the model system. We’ve already talked about it a little but I feel it really comes into its own with ships. If you compare the Hood and Scharnhorst, in Hearts of Iron 2 the Scharnhorst is the superior ship in all aspects, as it is a model 4 battle cruiser while the Hood is only a model 3battle cruiser. However with the Hearts of Iron 3 system we can do a very neat trick. The Hood is a large ship with 15’’ guns and a lot of Anti-Aircraft batteries, however its design is pre-Jutland and thus it had a known vulnerability to plunging fire. The Scharnhorst is much faster, better armoured ship, but only carries 11’’ guns. We can now simulate this; the Hood is defined with much better armament and anti-aircraft values, while the Scharnhorst scores better in engine and armour values. Different ship designs can be different, and naturally these are all modable.
We have also scraped the naval attachment system all together and instead we have defined each individual technology to be upgradeable or not (surprisingly this is also fully modable). For ships it means you can partially upgrade old ships. If you build a ship its main gun armament is fixed for all time, however its anti-aircraft batteries are very much upgradeable. We feel this system sets up the right blend of newer ships being better than older ships without the old ships simply being useless.
Next to Naval orders. We’ve made a couple of changes to naval orders. Firstly we have added the infinite order, for something like convoy escorts, you send you fleet out and the order will run indefinitely. With an added twist, each naval base can also be set up with a pool of reserves. These sit in port, repair if they need it, upgrade if they can, but when ever a fleet that is on an infinite order needs to return to port these ships will be used to replace them (providing they are of the same type). Thus if your ships, have low org, or are damaged, rather than having to go to all the trouble of sending a different fleet out on exactly the same order the system will take care of this automatically. What we’ve tried to do is hold down the planning overhead for your missions, yes you may want to go back from time to time and adjust them, but as long as things are going ok you can leave your naval units to get on with it.
Thus you now have extra time plan your naval big naval operations, like sending out the Bismarck to go convoy raiding in the Atlantic. To help facilitate this we’ve added a cool new feature, multiple detection levels. Knowing an enemy fleet is in a sea zone is not enough to be able to engage it, the ocean is a big place and all you know is that a fleet is somewhere. You need to pinpoint the fleet’s location better than that if you wish to actually fight it. First up we have added a patrol order (best suited for light ships), these ships will search sea zones in its area of operation looking for enemies, if an enemy fleet is partially detected it will focus its search in that sea zone. Once the patrolling ships find an enemy they don’t seek to engage (unless the odds are very good), instead they will try to trail the enemy, keeping it in contact until heavier ships come along to help out. Note the trailed ship has a chance of detecting its shadow and trying to sink it before help can arrive. The final piece of the puzzle is the naval intercept order, this is for your big fleet, and they sit in port waiting for the enemy to be found by your patrol ships. As soon as the enemy is positively identified and they like the odds (which you determine) they will sail off and try and sink them.
I suppose at this point I should mention that the system as detailed above is an optional extra. You can still manually move ships about, set ships onto short timed orders, you do not have to assign reserves. It is up to you to determine how much of the naval war you want to manage.
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