Hearts of Iron 3

[kris4o1993]

Development Diary #8 - 3rd of December 2008

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?

To end this weeks development diary, we’re going with a few screenshot of South America, where so many of the major battles of WW2 was.

[xopxe]

To end this weeks development diary, we’re going with a few screenshot of South America, where so many of the major battles of WW2 was.

[kris4o1993]

Как може да не си чувал за големите битки на Южния фронт?? За тригодишната обсада на Буенос Айрес или пък за изненадващата атака над Фолкландските острови? Ами за пакта между Аржентина и Бразилия, с който си поделят Парагвай?

[kris4o1993]

Development Diary #9 - 10th of December 2008

Welcome to the 9th chapter of the development diary. We are continuing working on naval combat, and developing various logics to how naval units behave. It is also rather exciting to see the progress of the new espionage system.

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.

I know we’ve sort of rambled on a bit here, but the logistics system was something we put a lot of work into designing and implementing and we are really pleased with the results.

Here is an example of the logistics mapmode, where you can see how the supply networks in France are going, while you also see the convoys going to and from France proper, depicted with arrows.

[kris4o1993]

Ето ви 1 нов скрийншот:

[messire Woland]

Съдейки по досега показаното от играта, създателите се движат в посока към карта, базирана върху шестоъгълници. Макар и не толкова явно, все пак се вижда. Разделението на пространствата по картата е вечен проблем, без едно универсално решение. Да видим обаче на какво ще се спрат в крайна сметка.

[Fasho]

А този момент с капацитета на пристанището при снабдяване на експедижионни сили. Хубаво е да се ограничи обема "съплай", който преминава през едно пристанище - това е в рамките на приближаването към реализма, а дали ще се светнат, че снабдяването може да става през повече от една входни точки?

[kris4o1993]

Development Diary #10 - 17th of December 2008

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 3 battle cruiser while the Hood is only a model 2 battle 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.


Here's two screenshots, since its christmas..

In the first one, I've set up a small british destroyer squadron to face the might of the Kriegsmarine. We're pretty deeply zoomed in, so you see some details on the ships as the fight.




We've also got a very zoomed out view of western asia as well, including the indian sub-continent.

[kris4o1993]

Development Diary #11 - 7th of January 2009

Well Christmas and New Year are over which means we have to stop sitting around enjoying holidays and go back to work. However don’t say we aren’t nice to you, despite not planning to we have decided to release a short developer diary talking abit about the intelligence system.

An important feature in any strategic war game is intelligence and perhaps most important of all only having part of the picture. The second part is how do you determine what the enemy has behind the line, especially if you are say Germany sitting in France and wondering what the Allies are up to over the other side of the channel.

As mentioned in passing in the previous developer diary we have several detection levels that allow you to see various levels of detail about a province. As with the previous incarnations of Hearts of Iron one way to find out things is your units on the front line patrolling and finding out what is on the other side of the front, this remains and forms your first shot and finding out what is there. However that doesn’t quite solve the problem of what is behind the line.

With that in mind let’s talk about a nice little change from Hearts of Iron 2, the radar station, no longer just a radar station but is now an intelligence-gathering site. The radar station is now also a signal intercept and analysis station, giving you (and the bad guys, mustn’t forget about them) the ability to peer behind enemy lines. The bigger the radar station the better you are at doing this.

A number of factors come into play here, firstly you have encryption and decryption, as with previous versions of Hearts of Iron these make it harder for the enemy to see what you are up to and easier for the you to determine what the enemy is up to. We also have a generic radio technology that gives combat bonuses to your units but also makes them easier to detect (our logic here that even if your ability to decrypt the enemy radio signals is poor things like traffic pattern analysis will allow you to build up a picture of what the enemy is doing).

Next is the level of the unit, the higher level of head quarters the easier they are to detect. Basically we feel that these have more to say than lower level HQs. It also allows you to do the rather neat trick of setting up an Army Group HQ (let’s call it the US 1st Army Group just for arguments sake) in southeastern England commanded by a senior General (perhaps Patton) and I suppose if we wanted to go the whole hog here we could assign a few army and corps HQs to this formation. As divisions are harder to detect than the higher level HQs the fact that no divisions can be detected doesn’t actually say there are none. So the German player cannot ignore the possibility that there could be an invasion at Calais.

Well that’s the theory at any rate, how does the effect the game. Well we now have an increasingly incomplete picture of what is going on behind enemy lines. We feel this adds two things to the game. First off is realism people’s intelligence picture wasn’t just limited to the front line and where aircraft happen to be flying they did know bits and pieces of what was happening else where. Secondly it adds another layer of strategy to the game, you are not just asking yourself where the enemy is but you also need to ask the question how good is my intelligence? It also has a very nice effect for the AI, a player can try and guess where the enemy is going to attack but the AI simply can’t. Now the AI can look behind enemy lines without having to resort to any of those crutches that annoy players so much. The AI can start to react to things like a build of allied troops in Southern England (could this be Overlord?) within exactly the same rule mechanics that a player is operating in.

As you can see here, Germany has a level 10 radar/listening station in western Germany, which reaches deeply into Western Europe. We are in the intelligence mapmode, where the provinces are coloured depending on what intelligence level you have on the province. Red means you have no intel, and various shades of green depict how much you know. As you can see, you can depict units or indications of units further behind frontlines, depending on the factors we’ve outlined earlier.

[kris4o1993]

Development Diary #12 - 14th of January 2009

Hello everybody and welcome to yet another issue of the Hearts of Iron 3 development diaries. The cold darkness of winter is still upon us, and we labour endlessly in front of our computers. This last week, our artists have been working on implementing more animated planes, and the Japanese Zero is now in the game. They’ve also worked quite a lot at improving the ingame interfaces. Our programmers have been busy working on the core of the AI, while wrapping up the logic for the final unit interfaces. Order of Battles are being adapted for the scenarios, while we still discuss exactly how certain functions will work. All in all, the project is going along nicely.

If we cast our mind back to the distant past when this game call Hearts of Iron was released, some of you may of heard of this, there was this interesting problem in Multiplayer. Everyone knew that the Axis were pretty much doomed, so if you were a country like Italy or Japan you had no logical reason to join to Axis. As the Allies (or Comintern I guess) you had no logical reason to refuse either Italy or Japan if they decided to join you team. Although this was solved by the rather nifty solution that is the house rule. This problem persisted in Hearts of Iron 2 and to be honest we here at Paradox Towers felt that all in all this was unsatisfactory. So we put our collective heads together and began to think about what we could do. On the one hand we wanted a system that would deliver the historical result but at the same time we wanted to introduce an element of uncertainty and make sure that you could not take the historical outcome for granted. So we dreamed up the concept called alignment.

Alignment feels the same way that the relations’ triangle did in Hearts of Iron. You have the three factions, Allies, Axis and Comintern, and how each country sees itself in relation to them. However the trick we have added is that Alignment influences which faction you can join. If you are neutrally aligned you cannot join any Faction, while if you are aligned towards the Axis then you can only consider joining the Axis. Now there are other factors in play than influence this, like relative threat and neutrality, but this is the basics. So through our starting set ups we can give countries a bent towards joining a particular alliance, Italy and Japan are aligned Axis while America is aligned towards the Allies.

Now the interesting thing here is inside this triangle you start to drift. Part of this you can influence, there is a diplomatic action that influences your drift speed towards a faction. This doesn’t work the same way influencing a nation does in Hearts of Iron 2. This is a long term action that runs for a period time giving the country a small nudge in that direction. We did this for three reasons, first up is micromanagement, we did not want to make influencing countries a click fest. Secondly we wanted diplomacy to be a long-range strategic decision, not a spur of the moment choice. Thirdly realism, we felt it was more realistic for two reasons. A country doesn’t just suddenly like the Axis it is more of a gradual process and also if Germany is making a Diplomatic move towards say Hungary then other countries will be aware of this and can consider trying to make counters to this. Minister choice can also influence how a country drifts.

However there are also other factors that influence drift. First off is ideology, you have an intrinsic drift towards the faction that shares your ideology, proximity also influences drift, the closer you are to faction members the more likely you are to cosy up to them instead of your natural ideology. It also prevents suicidal behavour by countries. Switzerland may be democratic, but if it surrounded on all sides by Axis countries it is going to take some persuading to even consider joining the Allies. Having cores on a faction member or you having cores on them will cause you to drift away from that ideology. So let’s just look at was these mean in practice. Let’s take 2 examples, first up is Italy. Italy has a natural Axis alignment and due to having a fascist government it has a natural drift towards the Axis camp. Its initial border with France will delay its drift into the Axis camp, but once Austria goes this will be cancelled out. Essentially if the Allies want to keep Italy out of the Axis camp they will have to move early and aggressively. Next up Finland. As a democratic state it is a small drift towards the Allies. However it has claims on the Soviet Union so it will drift away from Comintern (i.e. towards both the Axis and the Allies). Should Germany conquer Norway then Finland will drift even more towards the Axis causing Finland to align into the Axis camp and think about getting some revenge on the Soviet Union.

So that is Alignment, we have aimed to strike a balance between the historical outcome and logical reasons that cause it diverge.

And here’s a quick look at how it looks like in the game.




И още малко инфо относно някои от допломатическите мисии:

Declare limited war is a special power you get if you are a member of the Axis, you can start a war and not call in your Allies. If you were like an Italian Dictator and wanted to say conquer Greece on your own without any help from your allies you would do something like this. It also allows Germany and Japan to be aligned together but not in war together against the Soviet Union. If Germany were to say declare a limited war against the Soviet Union then each Axis member would need to decide if they wanted to join the limited war giving a staggered entry into the war and some (say Bulgaria) not bothering at all.

-what is the difference between "offer alliance" and invite to faction?

An Alliance is just an alliance between two countries, say France and Romania, it goes no further than that. A faction is something like the Axis with a multiple members and special powers if you are a member of it.

-So, every Faction will have its own "special powers"?

Yes, as a member of the Axis you get the ability to wage a limited war without your allies interfering. Members of Comintern do not have to pay money to trabuy resources off each other (that was mentioned back in Liepzig), there are more but I amn't telling.

[kris4o1993]

Development Diary #13 - 21st of January 2009

Hello, we are back with the lucky 13th episode of the Hearts of Iron 3 development diary. Progress has been going strong the last week, and we’re happy with the feature we will be presenting today.

So we are back talking about politics. As mentioned in previous developer diaries, Hearts of Iron 3 is a grand strategy war game. Our main focus through out is on the war. However as some German guy once said, war is a continuation of politics by other means. So although we were never going to lavish a lot of attention on it, we felt that politics should at the very least get a little tender loving care. Our goal was to give the internal politics of a country have a little more depth and try to make it function more dynamically. The biggest restriction we placed upon our changes was that it should feel right for the era.

Before we launch into this let’s recap briefly about party organisation, as seen a previous developer’s dairy. Each party has a value representing its relative organisation value inside the country. This number is listed between 0-100 and the total organisation value inside a country will also be 100. This is a 0 sum game where increases in organisation by one party hit the others. This in turn feeds into a party’s ability to mobilise support for things like elections and, for those more cloak and dagger types, coups.

First off I suppose your are wondering what happens if you end up with someone like the National Socialists as the largest party but your country is a democracy. In this scenario your democracy is living on borrowed time. Sooner or later there will be a fire in the parliament building, a state of emergency and a dictatorship. Now I know what you are thinking, what are the odds? However as with all these things we work on the policy, well it could happen.

Onto the cabinet, as with all the various incarnations of Hearts of Iron, there is a ten-man cabinet where each minister has a different type of effect. However with new toys we have to play with in Hearts of Iron 3 we have overhauled these effects. We personally felt that a lot of minister’s bonuses were independent of your current situation where we feel that the minister choice should reward long-term strategy. So let’s look at some of our new minister effects. Your choice of foreign minister will in the main affect your drift, thus who you pick will have a long term affect on which faction your country moves closest to. Same with your military staff positions they, in general, affect practical decay. So if you have Armoured Spearhead Doctrine Chief of the Army he will get you cheaper tanks and better tank technologies but to get the best out of him you are really going to need to build some tanks.

Next, as you are no doubt aware the trusty sliders have gone, to be replaced by laws. We like laws a lot more, because unlike sliders who have a fixed time limit between changes, with laws we can make the switch context sensitive. So consider the situation where your neighbour has become just a little bit threatening, so you up your draft level to increase the size of your army. Then your neighbour attacks you, in Hearts of Iron 2 you would have to wait until the next slider change, with laws since you are at war you can immediately start to mobilise your country for war. It also adds in the effect that moving towards a greater war orientation is not a simple annual step, but an actual process that takes into account the global situation.


Here’s a screenshot of Nazi Germany in 1936.

[kris4o1993]

Development Diary #14 - 28th of January 2009

Hello everybody, welcome to another development diary. This one a little early...

Back to talk a little bit more about technology. Before we launch into it, let’s just recap from the previous developer diary. There are no longer any tech teams, instead a country generate ‘leadership’ points which can be spent on technology, although diplomacy, espionage, and your army all place demands on this resource. There are no longer tech teams; instead we have two concepts called theory and practical. The values of these alter the time it takes to research a technology. Finally we have a modular technology system, where instead of researching a single tank model, you research various components, each one altering different stats in model.

So having done the quick recap let’s talk some more about technology. First off the burning question, model names? Well as we said we would do, and we have done it. We now have files that define at which tech level the flavour name for a unit changes. However instead of them being simply the same for everyone, for the majors we have customised the various technologies according to how we think the different models differ from each other. Now in this regard model stats are a bit like economists, put 3 Hearts of Iron fans in a room and ask them to come up with some model stats, and you’ll get 4 answers. So our guess is probably none of you will be satisfied with every model stat choice we have made. Now there isn’t a huge amount we can do about this, so we’re going to have to live with this. However the model technology definitions are all stored in nice plain text files that are easy to mod.

So onto the technology interface, here is a screen shot.



Before I start you can safely ignore the technologies currently researched, these are simply holding techs for us to get on with development. Later on we will go back through them with a fine toothcomb to get the right combination of historical accuracy and balance. Secondly this tech list is by no means final, we will probably add more but this should give you a pretty good idea in which direction we are heading when it comes to technology.

Finally let’s talk a bit more about the theories and practicals. Now they pick up part of the functionality that tech teams had in Hearts of Iron 2. The components tech teams had would give countries certain advantages in researching certain technologies (for example the USA and carriers). Now the theories and practicals mean that we can duplicate this effect and make the system dynamic. However there is also another nice consequence of the system, we have far more theories and practicals than we have technology research components in Heats of Iron 2 (roughly 50), this allows us to be far more focused when we hand out these bonuses to countries. So instead of unintentionally giving a country the ability to research something when we give them a bonus in something else, we can give them only the bonus we intend. Thus we make someone good at fighter research, we may also choose to make them better at general aircraft research if we want, but we will not hand them any additional ability to research or build aircraft carriers. With practicals feeding into production it gives us a very powerful tool for game balance. Let’s take one of the harder conflicts to balance in Hearts of Iron 2, Japan vs China. Trying to give China enough IC to resist a Japanese player who went full out land while at the same time giving the Japanese enough IC to go for balanced approach for a Pearl Harbour was a very difficult balancing act to achieve. With this system we first give the Japanese player the incentive not to go all out on the land. Secondly if we still don’t like the balance and wish if only the Chinese could build a few more militia units, we don’t have to add to the IC total of China and make them better at everything, a little tick up on militia practical and we have exactly we want while reducing the possible side effects.

All in all Theory and Practical is one of those powerful game features we are most proud we added in Hearts of Iron 3. Very simple in conception, so easy for a player to grasp and understand. Yet at the same time highly flexible in how it works, meaning that the system offers many possibilities to explore while playing. Throw in that it gives us a real great way to both improve game balance and add to historical immersion and it is one of those things that we feel will make Hearts of Iron 3 be more than Hearts of Iron 2 with some new graphics and extra provinces.

Here below is example of two technologies scripted in the files.

cavalry_smallarms = {
	
	cavalry_brigade = {
		build_cost_ic = 0.05
		build_time = 2
		supply_consumption = 0.05
		soft_attack = 0.2
		
	}

	research_bonus_from = {
		mobile_theory = 0.3
		mobile_practical = 0.7
	}
	
	on_completion = mobile_theory
	difficulty = 1
	
	#common for all techs.
	start_year = 1918
	first_offset = 1934	#2nd model is from 1934
	additional_offset = 2	#one new every 2 years
	folder = infantry_folder
}

This is a technology that affects the cavalry brigade. It is an unlimited technology, which means that new levels can be researched whenever you want one. It increases soft attack of cavalry brigades for a minor cost increase. Mobile theory and practical affects it, and finish researching it increases mobile theory.

radio = {
	combat_efficiency = 0.1
	decryption = -0.2

	allow = {
		radio_technology = 1
	}

	research_bonus_from = {
		electornicegineering_theory  = 0.5
		mechanicalengineering_theory = 0.5
	}

	on_completion = electornicegineering_theory

	difficulty = 2

	start_year = 1936
	folder = industry_folder
}

Radio is a oneshot technology. You also need to have researched radio technology to be able to research it, and it grants a large combat benefit, but also lowers your chance of keeping your troops hidden.

[kris4o1993]

Още скрийншотове






















Надявам се да оправят границата на България, защото сега прилича все едно някой се е изср*л върху Балканите...

[kris4o1993]

Development Diary #15 - 4th of February 2009

The Axis, the Allies and Comintern

World War II was a clash of the three great ideologies of 20th Century with Fascism, Democracy and Communism fighting in war of ideas. In Hearts of Iron 3, each ideology is represented by a faction and each faction has its own special brand of power. We did this for two reasons, firstly because we felt that these ideology groups were distinct and different and as such should play slightly differently. The Second reason was replayability, win as Germany, well why not try the Soviet Union? The rules change a bit and this means that your strategic options change a bit as well.

The Three Factions:

The Axis – The have nots, the countries that wish to over throw the territorial status quo and looking to expand, they will fight fiercely for what is theirs. They have the ability to pursue limited wars that do not bring in the rest of the faction members, allowing them to aggrandise themselves without having the share the loot. They also gain combat bonuses when fighting for provinces that they consider their cores.

The Allies – The Defenders of the Status quo, although allied countries populations wish to enjoy the fruits of peace they will make great sacrifices if war is forced upon them, in addition the Allies know that if they do not hang together they will hang separately. Members of the Allies have greater consumer demands during peace, but this is lowered during wartime. In addition guarantees of independence by Allied countries apply equally to all members of the faction, not just the country that issues the guarantee.

Comintern – The outsiders, the pulling power of the Communist Ideology leaves Comintern distrusted by all, but makes them the masters of subversion. They are also not bound by the rules of Capitalist markets making it easier for them support each other economically. Members of Comintern gain bonuses on espionage and can trade without payment with each other.

In each case we tried to make these abilities mimic historical conditions. Starting with the Axis, the Finnish army will be useful to recover Karelia and other territories, but deeper into Soviet Union it will become less effective. The Allies will find it harder to do a huge military build up during peacetime, but during war they will be able to unleash their full industrial might. The Soviet Union will be able to use their espionage abilities to infiltrate the enemies and discover their plans.
I suppose I should add that these are all sitting in a plain text file allowing you to edit them with ease. All in all we think we have achieved our goals in a simple but effective manner.

Here is an example of a part of the commons/ideology.txt file.

fascism = {

	national_socialist = {
		color = { 40 40 40 }
	}
	
	fascistic = {
		color = { 60 60 60 }
	}
	
	paternal_autocrat = {
		color = { 90 90 90 }
	}
	
	faction = {
		tag = axis
		icon = 2
		rule = { limited_war = yes }
		modifier = { territorial_pride = 0.1 } #10% extra
		influence = align_towards_axis
	}
	
	position = { x = 200 y = 200 }

}

To end it all, here is a screenshot of Yugoslavia:

[kris4o1993]

Ето клипче на което продуцентът Йохан Андерсън показва ключовите аспекти в играта:

http://www.n4g.com/pc/News-272229.aspx