Hi everyone and welcome to another dev diary for Hearts of Iron IV. Today we are going to talk about peace conferences!
HOI3's peace system was extremely simplistic and easy to exploit and did not really capture WWII and looking at our other games a peace system like Europa Universalis where a war leader dictates terms also does not really fit with WWII. So we set out to make something completely new!
So how does it work? During a war your participation as a member in the war is tracked compared to the rest. Remember Mussolini’s famous quote when about to join the war against France and UK "I only need a few thousand dead so that I can sit at the peace conference as a man who has fought"? We actually track casualties now and that will also factor into your participation score. Most important however is actually conquering enemy territory.
When the enemy finally surrenders the game initiates a peace conference. In multiplayer if there are several players involved this will pause the game and let everyone see what is decided in the conference even if you yourself is not in the war. Points representing the total value of things to grab among the losers is divvied out to the winners depending on what their war participation was at. Each country then takes turns deciding on what will happen to the losers. When you have less points than the person after you its their turn (you can also pass if you like) and on and on it goes until everyone has passed or run out of points. The losers have no say in this unless they have offered up a conditional surrender early on in which case they must approve the conference as well.
The above means that we can now model historical decisions to make sense. For example, there is a reason for USA to get involved in both the pacific war and Europe and not let Stalin decide the outcome on his own there. Taking control of Germany and liberating France will be a race for Berlin and will color how Europe looks after the war ends. The idea is very much to give you the feeling of the Yalta conference where Stalin’s position was very strong and the other heads of governments had less say.
The cost of different options depends on wargoals selected before the peace conference so anyone with justified reasons will be able to get those things cheaper, and it will be more costly for others to select those. Do note that order of participation still applies, so someone who has done more could still grab some of your war goal claims, but this would mean that they would themselves get to pick less over all. Stuff like that can set up things for post-war tension should players not be able to come to a resolution everyone is happy with. The basic type of action also affects costs of course, so liberating someone is cheaper than setting up a puppet government under your control, and annexing is much more costly than simply moving the borders some.
The conference also indicates what kind of impact it will have on world tension in the end. This may be a reason to be more restrictive about your choices. Puppeting someone might keep you under a level where the Allies still can not go in and stop you while annexing them would push you over the tension limit.
Next week we'll talk about the sleeping giant - USA!
