Some questions about aligning to factions

[AcaDia]

Hey everyone, I've recently started playing Hearts of Iron 3 and I'm loving it so far but I noticed this game tends to railroad countries in certain directions in order to keep it historical (fair enough, I understand Hearts of Iron 3 revolves around WWII) but I'm wondering if I could knock the train off the tracks so to speak.

At the moment the only expansion I don't have is the finest hour which I think I should pick up I just haven't yet...

So my question is I'm playing Sweden and I'm wondering if I can join a faction such as Soviets/Axis? I've been within 9 points (50/59) to joining but then Germany/UK started influencing me sending me back into the middle as neutral. Can I somehow make it to one side? and if so how?

Thanks!

 

[Pro_Consul]

There are options that could yield those kinds of results. Here are the ones that jump to the top of my head, so just pick whichever one seems like it will give results closest to the kind of game you are trying to get set up.

1. You could do a deferred selection kind of deal, where you start the game as the leader of the faction you want to eventually join. Use their spies and diplomacy to pull your target nation toward them or to setup a coup to oust the fence-sitting government your target nation starts with. Then when the conditions are favorable, tag switch or do the save/quit/reload-as-other-nation trick to switch to playing the target nation from that point forward. Obviously this one takes away your ability to do any kind of ahistorical build scheme in the target nation from day one, forcing you to wait until you switch before you can start deviating on large strategic decisions.

2. You could use spies against a large and nearby nation you intend to eventually side against to raise their threat level until it gets within 25 pts of your neutrality, which gives you the ability to declare war. Then declare war on some nation that is already at war with the faction you want to join. This should allow you to join their faction, and I suspect will force you into it willy-nilly.

3. You could create the conditions for your own government to be overthrown by intentionally raising your own dissent level until it reaches the breaking point. Not sure on the mechanics of if/how you can get the new government to have an ideology that matches the leader of your desired faction, though. Hopefully someone else will chime in and give us both the second half of this plan....

4. You could proceed as normal until it reaches the point you are ready to join the target faction, save the game, then edit the save file to place your own nation into their faction. (make a backup of that save before you edit it!)

 

[Kovax]

Besides obviously aligning to a faction, trade deals to raise Relations with any and all faction members can cause a significant amount of additional drift. See if you can assign a foreign minister with a trait to increase your Alignment to either Axis or Commintern, which will give a significant boost to how much effect aligning to that faction will have.

Then there is the console as a last resort.