What's wrong with the Hearts of Iron version of history

[FOARP]

Back when the first HOI game came out the game developers made choices about how the game was going to model various historical situations in-game. For entirely valid reasons the decisions made favoured whatever made for the best game-play. Many of these decisions have been carried over from game to game, again, for valid game-play reasons.

However, it's worth keeping in mind that this has resulted in HOI representing a version of history that is less accurate than it really could be. Examples:

1) Chinese Warlord states.

These are supposed to represent the quasi-independent nature of Chinese warlords. However, almost all of the warlords were at least nominally with the KMT and none of them would dare to, say, conduct foreign policy by themselves. The various cliques of the warlords were very fluid, with membership changing all of the time. Modelling them as independent states is a pretty big distortion of history.

This needs to be said because I've come across people online who think that Xibei San Ma (which just means "the three Mas of the North-West") was actually a country of some sort. In fact it was just an area controlled by warlords from the Ma family (actually a Chinese transliteration of "Muhammed") who were loyal to the KMT, and fought with on the KMT's side throughout the 1930s. You need only look at the uniforms and flags they flew, their titles, to see that they were basically part of "Nationalist China" - that part of China loyal to the KMT.

The same goes for the "Shanxi clique", "Guangxi Clique", and "Yunnan". All of these were areas ruled by warlords who were officially KMT generals and loyal to the KMT, the flag of nationalist China flew over all of them.

Moreover much of the area shown on-map as belonging to "Nationalist China" was also governed by warlords. Sichuan, for example, was governed by the warlord Liu Xiang. Liu Xiang and his men were no more or less loyal or obedient to Chiang Kai-Shek's government that those of other warlords territories. During the fighting for Nanjing, for example, Liu Xiang's men refused to obey any order that did not come directly from him - Chiang's men eventually took to issuing orders in his name.

I get the reasons why it was decided that Chinese warlords should be modelled this way (Chinese is over-powered otherwise), but a better way of simulating this really should be found. There were, historically, no "Chinese minors" (I assume this term does not include Tibet, and Communist China of course) and pretending that there were is a distortion. Personally, I would be happy with the "Chinese minors" basically being locked (similar to Muslim states in CK2), or represented as KMT territory (with a Warlord production/morale malus for the KMT) until a DLC can be made to properly simulate the actually historical nature of warlord territories.

2) The Philippines and other colonial territories.

The Philippines is shown as independent in 1936 (albeit as a puppet). I think most people know that it was not independent in the full sense of the terms, and would not become independent until years after this. Unlike historical puppet states like Manchukuo, it was not recognised by any other country. Instead the Philippines was essentially a US colony, albeit one on the way to independence. It neither controlled its own foreign policy, nor its own defence policy, and was basically no more independent than the princely states of India, or nominally-independent Egypt, or French-protectorate Morocco.

My understanding is that the Philippines is modelled this way because it was difficult to get the USA to defend the Philippines properly, but isn't it time that a better way of modelling this territory (and Egypt, and the princely states, and Morocco) was found that still achieved a decent defence of the Philippines?

3) Vichy France and its colonies.

Vichy France ended up fighting numerous conflicts in its colonies with various other parties. In Indochina it fought a successful war against the Thais before the territory was effectively taken over by the Japanese. In Syria and Lebanon it fought unsuccessfully against the British who were worried about the Axis establishing a presence there, with the same thing occurring in Madagascar. Finally, the Vichy fought briefly against the Anglo-American invasion of Morocco and Algeria before switching sides.

However, none of this has really been modelled properly in any HOI game I've played. The reason why is simple - it's basically just been too hard to model properly, with even the formation and dissolution of Vichy France proving problematic to model in-game.
​

Again, I understand why these things have been modelled the way they have been, and agree that game play is always the highest priority, but I really hope that aa way is found to model the above situations properly. People should not be under the misimpression that this is actually how things were historically and that the "HOI version of history" is actually how things were - most know better of course, but not all. Just because these things have been modelled in the same way in every previous game is no reason to model them in the same way this time round.

 

[Porkman]

​

Again, I understand why these things have been modelled the way they have been, and agree that game play is always the highest priority, but I really hope that aa way is found to model the above situations properly. People should not be under the misimpression that this is actually how things were historically and that the "HOI version of history" is actually how things were - most know better of course, but not all. Just because these things have been modelled in the same way in every previous game is no reason to model them in the same way this time round.

I agree with you entirely.

Do you happen to remember this thread, from way back in August of 2014? (The very first post where I got crazy with the colors)

I'm pretty sure that it addresses all of these.

Here's the repost hidden under spoiler tags because it's loooong.

Spoiler

Take a look at this map of all the colonial territory in 1936. (I greyed out the homelands of the colonial powers.)

This a quarter of the world's land area, and about a third of its population that was part of a colony at the beginning of WW2.

We've already had a thread about colonial troops but that's only a symptom of the larger problem which is the lack of a dedicated game mechanic to represent the colonies. I will also show how such a mechanic would also solve the problem of representing China.

So this post is going to be split into three sections because it's long.

1) The Solution: a colony mechanic.

2) The Problems of colonies in the current game.

3) How a colony mechanic could also fix China

Spoiler

I: A colony mechanic, my proposal. (actually based a lot on what OHgamer proposed for the original HOI3)

1) I propose that the areas of the world that were colonies in 1936, get their own special status called... (drumroll) ...colony!​

Countries that owned colonies would have something called "colonial policy" for their colonies which would function in a similar fashion to "Occupation policy" in the current game.

Each colony would have their own dissent, their own factories, their own resources, their own equipment pools and their own manpower. The differing colonial policies would determine how much IC/manpower/resources are taken out of the colony for use by the mother country vs. how much is left behind. The more severe and impoverishing the colonial policy the greater the potential for dissent and the more troops required to quell it. Japan, for example, would be using the harshest and most severe policy.

The owning nation would have the potential to raise them to puppets or grant full independence but that would be a big dissent and NU hit. Nations that conquer other nation's colonies would have the option of retaining them as colonies or creating puppet states (see Japan's experiments in Philippines, Burma etc). (Also, important, no new colonies could be created after the start of the game. "Colony" is there to represent areas that have been ruled for decades by foreign powers, not a handful of years.)

2) IC, manpower and resources can be taken from and given to the colony, for direct use by the mother nation but not with perfect efficiency.​

So if you take the IC for mother country production you can use it to produce a factory in England, but it won't be as effective as using that IC to produce another factory in Calcutta.

Conversely, a colonial power could also send resources, IC and equipment and MP to help the colonies develop military units and/or infrastructure. If you want to ship tanks to India or spend home country IC to develop the infrastructure or industrial sector in Vietnam, you can, but not with 100% efficiency.

3) Production of Military units from Colonial Areas would be based on that colony's manpower, resources and IC potential.​

(which explains why for example the defenses of Singapore and Hong Kong were so poor - Colonial office and the colonial bureaucracies in Hong Kong and Straits Settlements spent decades quibbling over who'd pay for the cost of improving military defenses, as Parliament in London was very, very stingy when it came to military spending for colonial defense and expected the colonies themselves to foot the vast majority of the bill. As for India, the entire cost of the Army of India was footed by the Indian taxpayer, not the British, and even in peacetime approximately half of the Indian budget was spent on the cost of the Royal Indian Armed forces).

The mother country would have complete control over what the colonies produced and how the IC was used, but units produced would have to deploy within the colony. The amount of colonial IC available for military production within the colony vs. used directly by the mother country vs. that lost to the civilian sector would be based on the physical IC on the map and the colonial policy.

4) Active use of colonial military units by the mother nation would be possible but dissent would rise a lot if more than handful are deployed outside of the colony.
​

Within the bounds of the colony where the forces came from, there would be no limit or penalty on how they were used. However, shipping colonial armies out of their colony would start raising dissent within the colony. The more units are shipped out the greater the internal dissent and less productive the colony with a chance of revolt if the colonial troops are out too long. This is to prevent Britain from deploying the entire Indian Army to Europe. Historically, they could move a couple divisions out of India at a time, but they had to leave the vast majority within the country to keep order.

Colonial troops would also be able to be merged and form divisions with units from the mother nation. A brigade of French infantry supported by 10,000 Tunisian irregulars in a single division is totally fine.

Also, deploying mother country troops to the colonies would reduce colonial dissent by significantly more than colonial troops themselves.

Spoiler

II: The Problem of colonies in the current game.

There are two main problems with the representation of colonies in the current game.

1) Colonial troops are not well represented.

2) Colonial resources, manpower, and risk of revolt also not well represented.

1) Colonial Troops are not well represented. ​

​

​

We had a thread about this here already...

Basically, in some places, “colonial” troops are far too powerful and in other theaters, they are far too weak.

Colonial troops were everywhere during the war the Indian Army had 2.1 million soldiers in WW2. They were present in the North African Campaign, the East African campaign and the Burma campaign and The Free French forces (in their hundreds of thousands) were mostly recruited from the colonies and fought in France and Italy. The Dutch used colonial irregulars in their defense of the East Indies. The Japanese used Taiwanese and Korean divisions to fight.

So they were there... but this, by itself, isn't the main reason why they are important. Why are they important for gameplay? The wars in the peripheral areas were almost always fought by a mixture colonial and metropolitan troops. The East African campaign had the British use local divisions and Indian army divisions to fight the Italians, the revolt in Iraq had the British use Indian army divisions, the Arab legion, and divisions from Palestine to put that down.

If you look at the British especially, but also to a lesser extent the French, the Italians, and the Japanese. The theoretical manpower they could have had during the war and the actual manpower they were able to use are vastly disparate. India in WW2 had 300 million people and it built a huge army but the game can't really show those troops without making it possible for the UK to redeploy the Hindu Horde to France and crush the Germans in 1939. Similarly, a good Italian or French player will always empty the colonies of troops before the war starts. There's are reasons that Italy, Britain and France didn't do this in real life that aren't represented by the game.

The British player never really has to struggle to cobble together a force from a bunch of different parts of the empire to deal with the latest crisis. British armies in India are either too powerful and useful via military control (the puppet route that many mods use) or non existent.

2) The colonial resources and politics aren't represented very well. ​

Colonies during the war were quite interesting, namely in that they switched sides quite often and in a way that's not very well represented by the current system. Colonies should be able to be fully captured without having to defeat the mother country first.

The current system is based on this idea of national territories and core provinces. If the player captures a part of France, the locals will resist and there will be partisans and it's core territory... etc. But that shouldn't be there when the British capture Libya. It's just some new foreigner running an area that was already under foreign control. The Japanese were able to capture and control Indochina entirely intact from the Vichy forces.

During the war, one of the most interesting bits was the gradual shift of French colonies from the Vichy to the Free French side. These colonies like Madagascar or Algeria were captured by Free French forces working in concert with the Allied powers and when they were captured they switched entirely. The current game uses events to simulate this badly since the actual base game mechanics would force the French player to annex the Vichy government in Metropolitan France before it could have full control of the colonies. In the current game, the Japanese similarly can't get their historical high level of control in the Dutch East Indies or Burma, since they can't possibly defeat the mother countries quickly.

Dissent in the colonies was also different from the mother country. All of the colonial powers needed to keep significant amounts of local or mother country troops within the colony to keep internal dissent from rising too much. The current game would let you empty out India without any consequences which is a problem.

This also opens up room in the intelligence missions for a "foment colonial revolt" which is also interesting.

Having a colony was a simple proposition for most countries. The colonies shipped resources to the metropolis and in return the metropolis sold finished goods to the colonies. The colonial governments were based on keeping order and resource extraction, they didn't care much who was ultimately in charge.

Spoiler

III: How this would fix China.

In all of the China threads, we've puzzled over how to model China effectively.

China has a huge army... but it's largely low quality.

China outnumbered the Japanese... but it rarely was able to concentrate troops effectively.

China was not completely unified... but the warlord cliques weren't separate countries in any way.

This can all be fixed by making the warlords colonies of Nationalist China.

1) This way, each of them would have their own troops... that would have to largely remain within their own war area.​

If the Chinese player tried to move too many out, the warlord areas would start having massive dissent and risk revolting. Because they'd have some base revolt risk already, this would also force the Chinese player to disperse some Central Army divisions to the warlord areas just to keep them in line. It would also allow the Japanese player to use a historical tactic against the Chinese, which was smashing the one Central Army division, knowing that this would cause the local divisions to melt away.

Also, if the Chinese player tries to disband too many local troops, the area will start having massively increased dissent. This will force the Chinese player to maintain a lot of weak troops.

2) This way, the warlords would each be producing low quality troops from local resources, relying on the Nationalist China player to send any advanced equipment that they either produce themselves or receive via Lend Lease. ​

We already know that production is going to be split into three types. Civilian, shipyards and military. Well, the lower Yangtze (the area near Shanghai) would be one of the only areas with military production at the start of the game. This will make the warlord areas reliant on the Chinese player to send equipment to equip the local forces This allows the player to actually engage in the sort of resource management that the Chinese did historically.

3) This way, Japan can get puppet Chinese forces.​

If the Japane take over Shanxi, they can use it to produce their own weak Chinese forces for internal dissent suppression and guarding infrastructure. Something that the Japanese did historically and has never been represented in any of the games. As a bonus, this also means those forces will be around when Japan surrenders and the Nationalists can use them in the Civil War (as they did historically.)

This would actually relate well to point 2 above, since the Nationalist player would have to balance strengthening North China to fight the Japanese with the knowledge that, when it falls, any equipment sent there would be inevitably turned against the Nationalists.

4) This gives China a fun and plausible path to unification that better mirrors history. ​

China can start the game with war goals that are based on turning the warlord areas from colonies to regular territory. They would be pretty simple if expensive and annoying. The Chinese player would have reduce dissent to a certain level, hold it there for a long time, as well as build a certain amount province improvements in the area. It would need to force the Chinese player to commit a certain amount of central government troops and IC that could be better used fighting the Japanese.

Even during the war, Yunnan went from being a warlord area to a core province as the amount of Central government troops and government bureaucrats and infrastructure development brought it under Nationalist control.

5) This also gives the Chinese an interesting choice about resisting during Marco Polo. ​

For the entire 1930's, Chiang Kai Shek was trading small amounts of territory to the Japanese for time to unify and strengthen the army. The Chinese player should have the same choice. There should be an option (which would cause a lot of internal dissent) that the Chinese player can make peace with Japan after it takes North China and then use the time to unify and strengthen the country. They would be able to buy 1 to 3 years of peace if they do this.

6) This makes for a far more interesting Civil War, including allowing the communists to build up the base areas and keep them after the war is over and allowing for the massive amount of troops switching sides that happened during the war.​

Japan, in a historical war, is going to take over Shanxi and convert it to a colony. The Communists can fight into there and take territory and if the war ends, the territory they took won't be automatically sent back to the nationalists but instead stay with the communists since the game mechanics will consider that they took it from the Japanese not Nationalist China.

When the Civil War starts, communist China can take out the warlord areas one by one and cause them to switch allegiance. Since local forces would switch sides with the colony.

That was long...

The two most important goals accomplished by this system would be fixing India and China. Especially China, where I know it's not perfect, but it fits better than independent countries or core territory.

What do people think?

(A thread to read if you want to know what happened 5 years ago when HOI3 was in development. )

Now, my points are in the reverse order to yours but I think it still works and addresses most of the points.

 

[shri]

Chinese warlords can be modelled as Puppets of the KMT, a crude alternative.
Phillipines and Vichy are far too tricky to model. Too much time and resources needed to do that.

 

[FOARP]

Chinese warlords can be modelled as Puppets of the KMT, a crude alternative.

That's certainly one way of modelling them - though the question then is: who was a warlord? Pretty much all of China was rule by one warlord or another, even if that warlord's name was Mao Zedong.

Phillipines and Vichy are far too tricky to model. Too much time and resources needed to do that.

Well, the Philippines were basically colonial territory and could simply be made US territory - I'm not even sure that the original reasons for making the Philippines independent in 1936 still actually apply.

 

[shri]

That's certainly one way of modelling them - though the question then is: who was a warlord? Pretty much all of China was rule by one warlord or another, even if that warlord's name was Mao Zedong.

I Agree.

Well, the Philippines were basically colonial territory and could simply be made US territory - I'm not even sure that the original reasons for making the Philippines independent in 1936 still actually apply.

making it US home territory is a bit "gamey".
you can then base the entire fleet there and finish off Japan in 1942 itself.

 

[FOARP]

I agree with you entirely.

Do you happen to remember this thread, from way back in August of 2014? (The very first post where I got crazy with the colors)

I'm pretty sure that it addresses all of these.

Here's the repost hidden under spoiler tags because it's loooong.

Spoiler

Take a look at this map of all the colonial territory in 1936. (I greyed out the homelands of the colonial powers.)

This a quarter of the world's land area, and about a third of its population that was part of a colony at the beginning of WW2.

We've already had a thread about colonial troops but that's only a symptom of the larger problem which is the lack of a dedicated game mechanic to represent the colonies. I will also show how such a mechanic would also solve the problem of representing China.

So this post is going to be split into three sections because it's long.

1) The Solution: a colony mechanic.

2) The Problems of colonies in the current game.

3) How a colony mechanic could also fix China

Spoiler

I: A colony mechanic, my proposal. (actually based a lot on what OHgamer proposed for the original HOI3)

1) I propose that the areas of the world that were colonies in 1936, get their own special status called... (drumroll) ...colony!​

Countries that owned colonies would have something called "colonial policy" for their colonies which would function in a similar fashion to "Occupation policy" in the current game.

Each colony would have their own dissent, their own factories, their own resources, their own equipment pools and their own manpower. The differing colonial policies would determine how much IC/manpower/resources are taken out of the colony for use by the mother country vs. how much is left behind. The more severe and impoverishing the colonial policy the greater the potential for dissent and the more troops required to quell it. Japan, for example, would be using the harshest and most severe policy.

The owning nation would have the potential to raise them to puppets or grant full independence but that would be a big dissent and NU hit. Nations that conquer other nation's colonies would have the option of retaining them as colonies or creating puppet states (see Japan's experiments in Philippines, Burma etc). (Also, important, no new colonies could be created after the start of the game. "Colony" is there to represent areas that have been ruled for decades by foreign powers, not a handful of years.)

2) IC, manpower and resources can be taken from and given to the colony, for direct use by the mother nation but not with perfect efficiency.​

So if you take the IC for mother country production you can use it to produce a factory in England, but it won't be as effective as using that IC to produce another factory in Calcutta.

Conversely, a colonial power could also send resources, IC and equipment and MP to help the colonies develop military units and/or infrastructure. If you want to ship tanks to India or spend home country IC to develop the infrastructure or industrial sector in Vietnam, you can, but not with 100% efficiency.

3) Production of Military units from Colonial Areas would be based on that colony's manpower, resources and IC potential.​

(which explains why for example the defenses of Singapore and Hong Kong were so poor - Colonial office and the colonial bureaucracies in Hong Kong and Straits Settlements spent decades quibbling over who'd pay for the cost of improving military defenses, as Parliament in London was very, very stingy when it came to military spending for colonial defense and expected the colonies themselves to foot the vast majority of the bill. As for India, the entire cost of the Army of India was footed by the Indian taxpayer, not the British, and even in peacetime approximately half of the Indian budget was spent on the cost of the Royal Indian Armed forces).

The mother country would have complete control over what the colonies produced and how the IC was used, but units produced would have to deploy within the colony. The amount of colonial IC available for military production within the colony vs. used directly by the mother country vs. that lost to the civilian sector would be based on the physical IC on the map and the colonial policy.

4) Active use of colonial military units by the mother nation would be possible but dissent would rise a lot if more than handful are deployed outside of the colony.
​

Within the bounds of the colony where the forces came from, there would be no limit or penalty on how they were used. However, shipping colonial armies out of their colony would start raising dissent within the colony. The more units are shipped out the greater the internal dissent and less productive the colony with a chance of revolt if the colonial troops are out too long. This is to prevent Britain from deploying the entire Indian Army to Europe. Historically, they could move a couple divisions out of India at a time, but they had to leave the vast majority within the country to keep order.

Colonial troops would also be able to be merged and form divisions with units from the mother nation. A brigade of French infantry supported by 10,000 Tunisian irregulars in a single division is totally fine.

Also, deploying mother country troops to the colonies would reduce colonial dissent by significantly more than colonial troops themselves.

Spoiler

II: The Problem of colonies in the current game.

There are two main problems with the representation of colonies in the current game.

1) Colonial troops are not well represented.

2) Colonial resources, manpower, and risk of revolt also not well represented.

1) Colonial Troops are not well represented. ​

​

​

We had a thread about this here already...

Basically, in some places, “colonial” troops are far too powerful and in other theaters, they are far too weak.

Colonial troops were everywhere during the war the Indian Army had 2.1 million soldiers in WW2. They were present in the North African Campaign, the East African campaign and the Burma campaign and The Free French forces (in their hundreds of thousands) were mostly recruited from the colonies and fought in France and Italy. The Dutch used colonial irregulars in their defense of the East Indies. The Japanese used Taiwanese and Korean divisions to fight.

So they were there... but this, by itself, isn't the main reason why they are important. Why are they important for gameplay? The wars in the peripheral areas were almost always fought by a mixture colonial and metropolitan troops. The East African campaign had the British use local divisions and Indian army divisions to fight the Italians, the revolt in Iraq had the British use Indian army divisions, the Arab legion, and divisions from Palestine to put that down.

If you look at the British especially, but also to a lesser extent the French, the Italians, and the Japanese. The theoretical manpower they could have had during the war and the actual manpower they were able to use are vastly disparate. India in WW2 had 300 million people and it built a huge army but the game can't really show those troops without making it possible for the UK to redeploy the Hindu Horde to France and crush the Germans in 1939. Similarly, a good Italian or French player will always empty the colonies of troops before the war starts. There's are reasons that Italy, Britain and France didn't do this in real life that aren't represented by the game.

The British player never really has to struggle to cobble together a force from a bunch of different parts of the empire to deal with the latest crisis. British armies in India are either too powerful and useful via military control (the puppet route that many mods use) or non existent.

2) The colonial resources and politics aren't represented very well. ​

Colonies during the war were quite interesting, namely in that they switched sides quite often and in a way that's not very well represented by the current system. Colonies should be able to be fully captured without having to defeat the mother country first.

The current system is based on this idea of national territories and core provinces. If the player captures a part of France, the locals will resist and there will be partisans and it's core territory... etc. But that shouldn't be there when the British capture Libya. It's just some new foreigner running an area that was already under foreign control. The Japanese were able to capture and control Indochina entirely intact from the Vichy forces.

During the war, one of the most interesting bits was the gradual shift of French colonies from the Vichy to the Free French side. These colonies like Madagascar or Algeria were captured by Free French forces working in concert with the Allied powers and when they were captured they switched entirely. The current game uses events to simulate this badly since the actual base game mechanics would force the French player to annex the Vichy government in Metropolitan France before it could have full control of the colonies. In the current game, the Japanese similarly can't get their historical high level of control in the Dutch East Indies or Burma, since they can't possibly defeat the mother countries quickly.

Dissent in the colonies was also different from the mother country. All of the colonial powers needed to keep significant amounts of local or mother country troops within the colony to keep internal dissent from rising too much. The current game would let you empty out India without any consequences which is a problem.

This also opens up room in the intelligence missions for a "foment colonial revolt" which is also interesting.

Having a colony was a simple proposition for most countries. The colonies shipped resources to the metropolis and in return the metropolis sold finished goods to the colonies. The colonial governments were based on keeping order and resource extraction, they didn't care much who was ultimately in charge.

Spoiler

III: How this would fix China.

In all of the China threads, we've puzzled over how to model China effectively.

China has a huge army... but it's largely low quality.

China outnumbered the Japanese... but it rarely was able to concentrate troops effectively.

China was not completely unified... but the warlord cliques weren't separate countries in any way.

This can all be fixed by making the warlords colonies of Nationalist China.

1) This way, each of them would have their own troops... that would have to largely remain within their own war area.​

If the Chinese player tried to move too many out, the warlord areas would start having massive dissent and risk revolting. Because they'd have some base revolt risk already, this would also force the Chinese player to disperse some Central Army divisions to the warlord areas just to keep them in line. It would also allow the Japanese player to use a historical tactic against the Chinese, which was smashing the one Central Army division, knowing that this would cause the local divisions to melt away.

Also, if the Chinese player tries to disband too many local troops, the area will start having massively increased dissent. This will force the Chinese player to maintain a lot of weak troops.

2) This way, the warlords would each be producing low quality troops from local resources, relying on the Nationalist China player to send any advanced equipment that they either produce themselves or receive via Lend Lease. ​

We already know that production is going to be split into three types. Civilian, shipyards and military. Well, the lower Yangtze (the area near Shanghai) would be one of the only areas with military production at the start of the game. This will make the warlord areas reliant on the Chinese player to send equipment to equip the local forces This allows the player to actually engage in the sort of resource management that the Chinese did historically.

3) This way, Japan can get puppet Chinese forces.​

If the Japane take over Shanxi, they can use it to produce their own weak Chinese forces for internal dissent suppression and guarding infrastructure. Something that the Japanese did historically and has never been represented in any of the games. As a bonus, this also means those forces will be around when Japan surrenders and the Nationalists can use them in the Civil War (as they did historically.)

This would actually relate well to point 2 above, since the Nationalist player would have to balance strengthening North China to fight the Japanese with the knowledge that, when it falls, any equipment sent there would be inevitably turned against the Nationalists.

4) This gives China a fun and plausible path to unification that better mirrors history. ​

China can start the game with war goals that are based on turning the warlord areas from colonies to regular territory. They would be pretty simple if expensive and annoying. The Chinese player would have reduce dissent to a certain level, hold it there for a long time, as well as build a certain amount province improvements in the area. It would need to force the Chinese player to commit a certain amount of central government troops and IC that could be better used fighting the Japanese.

Even during the war, Yunnan went from being a warlord area to a core province as the amount of Central government troops and government bureaucrats and infrastructure development brought it under Nationalist control.

5) This also gives the Chinese an interesting choice about resisting during Marco Polo. ​

For the entire 1930's, Chiang Kai Shek was trading small amounts of territory to the Japanese for time to unify and strengthen the army. The Chinese player should have the same choice. There should be an option (which would cause a lot of internal dissent) that the Chinese player can make peace with Japan after it takes North China and then use the time to unify and strengthen the country. They would be able to buy 1 to 3 years of peace if they do this.

6) This makes for a far more interesting Civil War, including allowing the communists to build up the base areas and keep them after the war is over and allowing for the massive amount of troops switching sides that happened during the war.​

Japan, in a historical war, is going to take over Shanxi and convert it to a colony. The Communists can fight into there and take territory and if the war ends, the territory they took won't be automatically sent back to the nationalists but instead stay with the communists since the game mechanics will consider that they took it from the Japanese not Nationalist China.

When the Civil War starts, communist China can take out the warlord areas one by one and cause them to switch allegiance. Since local forces would switch sides with the colony.

That was long...

The two most important goals accomplished by this system would be fixing India and China. Especially China, where I know it's not perfect, but it fits better than independent countries or core territory.

What do people think?

(A thread to read if you want to know what happened 5 years ago when HOI3 was in development. )

Now, my points are in the reverse order to yours but I think it still works and addresses most of the points.

It's certainly one way of addressing it and it would be great to see Paradox thinking along these lines, or at least leaving scope for this kind of system to be implemented later on via DLC.

I'm a bit worried, however, that this won't happen because people expect HOI4 to have the same "countries" to be playable in HOI4 as were playable in HOI3, even if these countries didn't really exist historically and weren't really any fun to play anyway, either because they believe that this is actually historical, or simply because they were in HOI3.

 

[EmpireMagnis]

Wasn't early photos oh HoI4, China was united, for the exception of Sinkiang and Tibet.
Why not make China somewhat like Victoria 2, where these warlord states are puppets, where puppets can conduct any diplomatic options, as well as, if the player chooses, he can control his puppet's armies.

 

[Secret Master]

Back when the first HOI game came out the game developers made choices about how the game was going to model various historical situations in-game. For entirely valid reasons the decisions made favoured whatever made for the best game-play. Many of these decisions have been carried over from game to game, again, for valid game-play reasons.

However, it's worth keeping in mind that this has resulted in HOI representing a version of history that is less accurate than it really could be. Examples:

Let's talk about China for a second.

First of all, let me say that the limitations of HOI3's politics become apparent when looking at modeling China. The situation is super complicated. And it's not just HOI3. Vic2 and Eu4 have their own "solutions" to the China problem.

But I think the biggest problem is that without significant internal politics mechanics, there is no real solution. You could literally create an entire game for just China's politics in 1936 with the same level of details as CK2 in terms of personalities and still not get it quite right.

But HOI4 isn't a game with that kind of focus.

Porkman mentions a bunch of stuff that could be used to help the situation. And it's all very interesting. But what I find most interesting is that some of suggestions actually sound like they are from CK2. The warlords armies sound a bit like levies, and if Chiang raises them for too long (while the area of that warlord is not under direct attack), they get restless and irritable. And since they are warlords that control their own private armies, they may switch sides.

These are good ideas, but they bring us back to the whole "this isn't CK2" problem.

Honestly, it sounds like the only thing that would work is to fuse elements of CK2 to HOI4 for China's politics. There are no substates or minors or warlord states, but KMT effectively has vassals that control land and armies. The KMT can call upon these subordinates to help fight the war, but if they are feeling grumpy or feel that the KMT is wasting their resources, they might grow restless. They might also be bribed away by the Japanese. Or some other bad things could happen.

But of course, then we're back to "This game isn't just about China, and we only have finite development hours" as a problem.

I don't see any solution to these issues that won't cost untold manhours (beyond even a single DLC) or what won't boil down to simple numerical nerfs that we all hate anyway.

However, for what it's worth, I think a numerical nerf is the right answer. I've given it thought, and while I don't hate the sub-state thing for HOI4, for tactical and strategic reasons, I'd prefer a single large Chinese blob.

 

[Caesar15]

A post that is half about China? I know who to call: @Chukada

 

[Bernard Black]

I mostly agree with Secret Mastermind that you need a whole lot of tools to adaequatly represent the internal politics of China or the Colonies and that this is mostly a manhour problem. Maybe we see some improvements in DLCs. I think this is a part where their DLC policy can really shine.

However i strongly object to the notion that anyone should take the game as a proper history simulation and thats the reason it should strife to be as accurate as possible. Anyone who plays the game should know that it models a certain era and like every model simplifies and adjusts according to its main goal, which is a good gameplay in the end. I would like to see better mechanics for the states mentioned above, but more because i think they can result in an interesting and diverse game experience, not because i think it should be as historical as possible.

The argument of historical accuracy has limits and the main issue is twofold. First, its a game therefore gameplay takes always precedence over any other argument. Secondly a perfectly historicly accurate represention would basicly mean a simulation of the war with no player interaction, you just start and watch, because any player interaction is basicly a deviation from History. If you like the moment you go ahistoric with the game is the first of January 1936 because you make choices which are different then in real life. The whole point of the game is to explore different outcomes of the era.
That still means that the starting conditions should be as close to reality as possible.

TLR: I agree with your desire for better representation of said states and mechanics, but i think historical accuracy is a poor argument for it.

Regards

 

[safe-keeper]

I never understood the whole "this isn't CK2" deal. If a feature works, why not use it. It's not like we're going to turn the game into a CK2 clone, with Hitler plotting to kill Stalin with a fertiliser bomb, and the Allies trying to strengthen their factions by marrying into the governments of neutral nations. If something works, and the devs have shown they know how to implement it well, fine, go with it.

I don't know, it's just that I haven't seen an argument against "CK2 features" that hasn't been based on some kind of slippery slope fallacy.

 

[FOARP]

I never understood the whole "this isn't CK2" deal. If a feature works, why not use it. It's not like we're going to turn the game into a CK2 clone, with Hitler plotting to kill Stalin with a fertiliser bomb, and the Allies trying to strengthen their factions by marrying into the governments of neutral nations. If something works, and the devs have shown they know how to implement it well, fine, go with it.

I don't know, it's just that I haven't seen an argument against "CK2 features" that hasn't been based on some kind of slippery slope fallacy.

This is pretty much my point of view too. EU has had special mechanisms for the HRE for quite a while now, and in the DLC-era they're being implemented for other countries. I think a China-oriented DLC might be able to address the warlord issue. In the meantime, as a place-holder, I agree with @Secret Master that having a unified Nationalist China (i.e., sans Manchuria, Tibet, ChiComs and maybe Xinjiang) with a malus is probably the best way to go.

 

[Axe99]

Great thread FOARP (and posts all ). I'm not expert here, so I'm just along for the reading, but one thing I will add is that on the whole gameplay vs historical plausibility thing, to a point gameplay depends upon a certain level of historical plausibility for immersion, and that imo the best gameplay is, by and large, sensibly abstracted but still historically plausible mechanics (noting that my gameplay preferences are just that, and that others may prefer 'Bhutan can into space' and anywhere in-between, and everyone's preferences are equally valid ).

 

[Daelyn75]

I hope the developers read this thread. There is some real good information here.

 

[frolix42]

2) The Philippines and other colonial territories.

The Philippines is shown as independent in 1936 (albeit as a puppet). I think most people know that it was not independent in the full sense of the terms, and would not become independent until years after this. Unlike historical puppet states like Manchukuo, it was not recognised by any other country. Instead the Philippines was essentially a US colony, albeit one on the way to independence. It neither controlled its own foreign policy, nor its own defence policy, and was basically no more independent than the princely states of India, or nominally-independent Egypt, or French-protectorate Morocco.

My understanding is that the Philippines is modelled this way because it was difficult to get the USA to defend the Philippines properly, but isn't it time that a better way of modelling this territory (and Egypt, and the princely states, and Morocco) was found that still achieved a decent defence of the Philippines?​

The Philippines was under the aegis of the United States until July 4, 1946, so calling it a "puppet" is crude but effective way of describing that relationship. Calling the Philippines a "colony" after the Commonwealth of the Philippines was inaugurated on 15 Nov 1935 is a severe misnomer.

The Philippines was "not independent" in 1936 in much the same way that Canada, Australia and New Zealand were "not independent" in 1936. Unlike the British Commonwealth States, in 1935 the Philippines had elected it's own head of state. Unlike Manchukuo, the Philippine had a government and legislature that was not handpicked by their overlord. Manchukuo did not have it's own foreign policy, nor was it recongized by any country other than a few Allies of Japan. Unlike the British Indian Army, the Armed Forces of the Philippines was not explicitly a part of the military of the United States. The relationship between the Philippines and USA was very different from "the Princely States of India" by 1935. The United States recognized that the Philippines would be independent in the Philippine Organic Act of 1902. The British stubbornly held that India would continue to be a part of the British Empire until 1947.

 

[Anichent]

1) Chinese Warlord states.

These are supposed to represent the quasi-independent nature of Chinese warlords. However, almost all of the warlords were at least nominally with the KMT and none of them would dare to, say, conduct foreign policy by themselves. The various cliques of the warlords were very fluid, with membership changing all of the time. Modelling them as independent states is a pretty big distortion of history.

This needs to be said because I've come across people online who think that Xibei San Ma (which just means "the three Mas of the North-West") was actually a country of some sort. In fact it was just an area controlled by warlords from the Ma family (actually a Chinese transliteration of "Muhammed") who were loyal to the KMT, and fought with on the KMT's side throughout the 1930s. You need only look at the uniforms and flags they flew, their titles, to see that they were basically part of "Nationalist China" - that part of China loyal to the KMT.

The same goes for the "Shanxi clique", "Guangxi Clique", and "Yunnan". All of these were areas ruled by warlords who were officially KMT generals and loyal to the KMT, the flag of nationalist China flew over all of them.

Moreover much of the area shown on-map as belonging to "Nationalist China" was also governed by warlords. Sichuan, for example, was governed by the warlord Liu Xiang. Liu Xiang and his men were no more or less loyal or obedient to Chiang Kai-Shek's government that those of other warlords territories. During the fighting for Nanjing, for example, Liu Xiang's men refused to obey any order that did not come directly from him - Chiang's men eventually took to issuing orders in his name.

I get the reasons why it was decided that Chinese warlords should be modelled this way (Chinese is over-powered otherwise), but a better way of simulating this really should be found. There were, historically, no "Chinese minors" (I assume this term does not include Tibet, and Communist China of course) and pretending that there were is a distortion. Personally, I would be happy with the "Chinese minors" basically being locked (similar to Muslim states in CK2), or represented as KMT territory (with a Warlord production/morale malus for the KMT) until a DLC can be made to properly simulate the actually historical nature of warlord territories.

This is actually really helpful. Can someone explain a bit more of the politics of China at the time, or maybe locate some maps of the territories of each Chinese warlord, minor, etc. I do want to fix the gameplay of China when the game comes out since I'll be fixing other parts of the world too, but I am having trouble mapping China.

Manchukuo, Tibet, Mengjiang, and even China Nanjing are easy to map....but everything else about China is very complicated for HOI4.

What would some of your ideas for a solution be? That the warlord states should start as puppets of Nationalist China and just doing more work to balance the Chinese territories? Or some other mechanic?

 

[Porkman]

This is actually really helpful. Can someone explain a bit more of the politics of China at the time, or maybe locate some maps of the territories of each Chinese warlord, minor, etc. I do want to fix the gameplay of China when the game comes out since I'll be fixing other parts of the world too, but I am having trouble mapping China.

Manchukuo, Tibet, Mengjiang, and even China Nanjing are easy to map....but everything else about China is very complicated for HOI4.

What would some of your ideas for a solution be? That the warlord states should start as puppets of Nationalist China and just doing more work to balance the Chinese territories? Or some other mechanic?

Secret Master is right that the correct understanding of China and how its factions worked is closer to how CK2 relations work within a kingdom. (This is a de facto similarity, legally, China was a modern state with a modern constitution.)

China should be complicated. It has more people than the entirety of Europe.

This is a brief summary of Chiang Kai Shek and the warlords.

When the Republic of China was proclaimed in 1911, the catalyst was the Wuchang uprising. There had been many rebel actions against Qing rule before this, but the Wuchang uprising was the one that succeeded. Essentially, some revolutionaries among the garrison had been preparing bombs to launch their uprising. When one went off accidentally, they decided it was now or never. At this point, loyal Qing forces were definitely strong enough to crush the uprising, as they had crushed several before then, but they were slow in reacting and didn't immediately condemn the uprising, which caused many other southern provinces to proclaim their own independence. By the time the Qing reacted officially, much of the country was in a state of unrest.

When I say "provinces" declared independence, I mean armed generals and officials. }

The Chinese imperial system was designed so that military power and civil authority never rested with the same person in one province. The system was supposed to be a civil governor, a military governor, and an imperial censor who watched over both officials and reported directly to the emperor. However, the Taiping rebellion (1850-1864 and the second most deadly war in human history) had forced the Qing to allow the formation of several modern armies under the command of people who were both generals and governors. They hadn't been able to recentralize power after 1864. These were the guys who rebelled.

Unfortunately, the most powerful northern army was under a guy named Yuan Shikai. He didn''t rebel immediately and was capable of crushing the revolution. He actually led the government attack on the original uprising in Wuchang. All of the revolutionaries across China had declared allegiance to a state that didn't exist, the Republic of China. The revolutionaries agreed to elect Sun Yat Sen, (a well respected revolutionary who was in America at the time raising money for Chinese revolution) as the president in December of 1911.

The problem was that Yuan Shikai and other loyalist forces were still stronger than the rebelling forces. The revolutionaries eventually bought Yuan Shikai off by removing Sun Yat Sen and giving the office to Yuan Shikai in March of 1912.

He proceeded to do many undemocratic things (shooting the head of parliament, arresting people, he banned the KMT (the party which had lead the revolution) and crushed Sun Yat Sen's attempt at armed uprising) which culminated in Yuan Shikai proclaiming himself emperor in 1915. This was the final straw.

The regional generals rebelled again in what's called the Constitutional Protection War. Yuan Shikai's own base and army was not able to hold together because he himself died in 1916. In 5 years, his main contribution was to completely destroy the unity and legitimacy of the Republic of China. Many of the "warlords" of the WW2 era come from this time.They were all part of the Republic of China but they did not have any meaningful relationship with the government in Beijing. China was now dotted with provincial armies with provincial governor/generals who all said they were part of the ROC but didn't recognize any national government.

Sun Yat Sen responded to Yuan Shikai's rule by moving to Guangdong and accepting Soviet money to build an army that was loyal to the KMT. The nucleus of this was Whamphoah Military Academy and Chiang Kai Shek was the commandant. (Zhou Enlai, Mao's second in command, was the political officer.) This allowed Chiang Kai Shek to build relationships with many, many, many officers who would go on to command large numbers of troops. Sun Yat Sen died in 1925 and Northern Expedition reunited the country in 1926. The KMT's army was better trained and better armed but far outnumbered. Working in concert with the Communists, they were able to march all the way to Beijing and force the capitulation of most of the independent warlords.

But this victory was not complete, most of the warlords retained control of their troops and regional powerbases, but they at least had to pretend to listen to Nanjing (the new capital). The KMT purged its own left wing of at Chiang Kai Shek's urging in 1927. The National government was stronger than any one regional general, but regional forces as a whole still outnumbered the Central Army. In 1929, there was an arms reduction conference where it all broke down.

The regional warlords were not willing to disband their own armies in favor of Chiang Kai Shek and the central government. Yan Xi Shan (Shanxi in game) demanded Chiang Kai Shek's resignation. Bai Chongxi and Li Zongren (Guangxi in game) joined as well as Feng Yuxiang. This was the Central Plains War of 1930. Chiang Kai Shek was able to win when troops from Manchuria under Zhang Xueliang came down on his side.

Making matters more complicated was that these guys are all officially part of the army. (This conflict also gave the communists some breathing space).

Chiang followed up his victory in the Central Plains War by gradually centralizing the country. The Germans helped bring the Central Army upped to a higher standard, the reach of the Central Government was expanded, there were 5 extermination campaigns against the Communists. There was still some conflict between Chiang and the regional commanders but Chiang was able to win. (For example, the in game war between Guangxi and Nationalist China was actually resolved when Chiang bribed the entire Southern airforce to switch sides.) Chiang had things mostly in hand by 1937 when the Japanese attacked though the Central Army was still outnumbered 3 to 1 by regional Chinese forces.

When Japan attacked, direct conflict between the cliques became pretty much unthinkable, but Chiang Kai Shek did not trust many of his most competent and powerful generals because they had actively fought against him less than a decade prior. Yes, they were part of the Chinese National Revolutionary army and they nominally followed his orders but they could always refuse. The destruction of the best Central Army divisions during the Battle of Shanghai in 1937 also meant that the actual power balance between Chiang and the regional commanders was radically shifted in their favor. Even though no one could publicly contradict Chiang as the wartime leader of China, he had to rely on these same regional commanders for military forces where before he'd been able to bully them with the power of the Central Army.

This is a decent enough map, but it is a lot more complex than this.

 

[Secret Master]

I never understood the whole "this isn't CK2" deal. If a feature works, why not use it. It's not like we're going to turn the game into a CK2 clone, with Hitler plotting to kill Stalin with a fertiliser bomb, and the Allies trying to strengthen their factions by marrying into the governments of neutral nations. If something works, and the devs have shown they know how to implement it well, fine, go with it.

I don't know, it's just that I haven't seen an argument against "CK2 features" that hasn't been based on some kind of slippery slope fallacy.

This is pretty much my point of view too. EU has had special mechanisms for the HRE for quite a while now, and in the DLC-era they're being implemented for other countries. I think a China-oriented DLC might be able to address the warlord issue. In the meantime, as a place-holder, I agree with @Secret Master that having a unified Nationalist China (i.e., sans Manchuria, Tibet, ChiComs and maybe Xinjiang) with a malus is probably the best way to go.

It's because CK2's mechanics are focused on people far more than realms or nation states. HOI is a war game depicting wars between nation-state actors. In a world with finite man hours to develop a game and finite hours to play it, there are only so many things you can do without either bogging down gameplay or sacrificing other features the game needs.

Don't get me wrong: There are things I would salvage from CK2 to use in an HOI game. I personally think you could get some mileage out of a Staff System with some CK2-lite mechanics (which would apply to all nations and theaters, not just one).

But introducing a whole vassal-liege system with dynamic character interaction for China would amount to creating 50% of a new Paradox game just to make that one part of the world work. It would also turn a KMT playthrough into an entirely new game. It wouldn't be about nation-state actors waging huge wars against each other anymore.

But....

I might be more interested in a China with CK2 mechanics if it also meant that some of these mechanics would be in use in other parts of the world. If the mechanics in question were used to recreate other historical situations (Japanese militarists taking control in Japan, jockeying for Stalin's favor in the Soviet Union, Nazi party politics that result in lethal career problems, ministers winning or losing positions in the UK and so on), then it might be worth the development time and play time.

I see doing China justice requiring more time and effort than, say, Horse Lords or Rajas of India. Maybe I'm wrong.

 

[CrasherZZ]

Obviously, the KMT and the Warlords is a situation far too complex for HOI4 to model accurately, All that may be necessary, IMHO, are some tweaks to it since it's too complex to try to recreate historically. An acceptable level of abstraction might be:

1. Chinese warlord states are represented as a type of puppet state affected by special events. When all-out war occurs they merge with Nationalist China. When the war ceases they revert back to puppets if the territory hasn't been conquered. This should suffice for the 10 year period covered by the game.

2. Or, just get rid of the warlords altogether and represent them as political parties and factions within the political system. Give China a very high national unity penalty to represent the effects of the warlords. They could be represented by Civil Wars when political unity gets really bad.

3. Or, represent them as ongoing civil war events. Are multiple faction civil wars possible, as in post 1917 Russia?

The warlords should definitely not be separate countries on the level of Nationalist China. It doesn't have to be that simplistic.

 

[CrasherZZ]

The Philippines was under the aegis of the United States until July 4, 1946, so calling it a "puppet" is crude but effective way of describing that relationship. Calling the Philippines a "colony" after the Commonwealth of the Philippines was inaugurated on 15 Nov 1935 is a severe misnomer.

The Philippines was "not independent" in 1936 in much the same way that Canada, Australia and New Zealand were "not independent" in 1936. Unlike the British Commonwealth States, in 1935 the Philippines had elected it's own head of state. Unlike Manchukuo, the Philippine had a government and legislature that was not handpicked by their overlord. Manchukuo did not have it's own foreign policy, nor was it recongized by any country other than a few Allies of Japan. Unlike the British Indian Army, the Armed Forces of the Philippines was not explicitly a part of the military of the United States. The relationship between the Philippines and USA was very different from "the Princely States of India" by 1935. The United States recognized that the Philippines would be independent in the Philippine Organic Act of 1902. The British stubbornly held that India would continue to be a part of the British Empire until 1947.

For the purposes of warfare and gameplay in HOI4, the Phillipines is more like US territory, more like Puerto Rico. On paper, their army and foreign policy were separate from the US, but not in effect, especially on the geopolitical scale represented by the game. In the context of the game it is more like conquered territory about to be turned into a puppet in 1946. For the practical purposes of supply, politics, military movement, construction, etc it should be more like a "colony" for gameplay reasons. A colony is "conquered" territory effectively, and that's what the Phillipines were in 1936.