New HOI 3 player - asking for advice

[Kovax]

More reactors = more nukes.

 

[Mebsuta]

No harm done.



Nukes are simultaneously underpowered and over powered. The primary effect of nukes is the huge drop in National unity that they cause, but the most important effect is the destruction of infrastructure and supply in the province they're dropped in. Because all the supplies, fuel, energy, metal, rares, and oil stockpiles are stored on location at the capitol, and are all destroyed by a nuke, a single nuke will practically cripple a nation's war economy and logistics, but only dropped on the capitol. After that, you reach a point of diminishing returns. There's not much point to nuking more than the capitol of an enemy nation, they'll have smaller NU hits outside of the capitol and high victory point locations. You could try to pull a MacArthur and put a belt of nuked provinces behind an enemy army (since it destroys infrastructure) but again, if you hit the capitol and they have a large army, they're mostly going to be out of supply anyway. If you have the research to spare or can get your spies to steal a high level nuclear engineering tech, it can be a phenomenal tool, but its a huge investment. I wouldn't *start* researching it in '42 as the Netherlands, but it can definitely be a war-winner.

I left my game at 1944 last night. Already have nuclear reactor and civil research 2. It will take long, but hopefully I can bomb Berlin before Axis takes Moscow.

 

[Mebsuta]

More reactors = more nukes.

By this you mean that having 3 level 1 reactors on different provinces is more profitable than having 1 level 3 reactor only? Because I'm going for just one level 3 and I don't want to be told that that was a fuck up. I already deleted saves prior to save space.

 

[marxianTJ]

My assumption is *any* instance of larger or more reactors will result in more nukes.

 

[alhoward]

There should be no difference except possibly in the rate that they "repair" once you finish them in the cue, but unless I'm mistaken, the only effect the reactors have on producing nukes past the required 3 or 4, is to increase the nuclear practical, which lets you research a higher level of the Nuclear Bomb tech. I thought that each level of Nuke tech gives you faster nuke production per month in increments of .1, and that *having* reactors doesn't do anything past the first three, it's only building them that helps you out a little.

 

[Mebsuta]

By 1946 when I could finally research atomic boms, USSR had already bounced back and conquered Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Hungary and Slovakia. They puppeted Poland and Yugoslavia, too. And they let me have Italy, France, Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg as puppets. The european war was well over before I could have bombs made. And if it is true that the game ends at 1948, we could have taken Japan (and achieve all victory conditions in doing so) but not enough time to kill the allies.

I really do not understand how is it possible that the game ends on 1948 when SO MANY techs level way past that date. It feels super stupid to have that many techs available only after the game ended.

 

[marxianTJ]

That's because they're mostly hold overs from Hoi2. I think when they released Hoi3 they fully intended to extend the game's end date as they did hoi2 (which, with expansions, was brought up to an end date in the 1960s). Then they decided to make East vs. West, which would've been a standalone game using the Hoi game as its base with an end date somewhere probably in the 1980s - but then they scrapped that project and thus Hoi3 has a ton of techs that can't really be used.

Part of the reason for that shift was when the game was released it ran *very* poorly on the available hardware the later in game years you went due to the huge amount of units doing stuff at midnight. It got *really* bad. It was also known from hoi2 that this problem would only get worse (as hoi2 itself had tremendous lag issues the higher the game year total went due to the sheer amount of units being tracked I remember waiting upwards of 4 minutes for a midnight track to resolve lol) so that likely played a factor in their decision not to go any further with the product. Now it wouldn't be as much of a problem as PC hardware is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was 10 years ago, but it's a decade late.

 

[alhoward]

Also, in older versions of the game the penalty for researching ahead wasn't nearly so oppressive, with the downside that having laser rifles and rail guns in 1944 made the game a bit underwhelming when the AI is still busy researching supply tech 4 and naval doctrines for their fleet of four half strength transport ships. You'd still never hit level 12 techs in a normal game, but if you really rushed them and made it to 1948 without your game committing suicide, you could get close. In TFH they've ramped up the penalties to the point where I don't think you can even get close.

 

[Count Blue]

I really do not understand how is it possible that the game ends on 1948 when SO MANY techs level way past that date. It feels super stupid to have that many techs available only after the game ended.

Yeah, to extend the date beyond that point is something almost every mod does and I believe all players do to the vanilla game.