Development Diary #22 - 1st of April 2009
Well with GDC over for another year so it is once back to sunny Stockholm, not missing the weather in San Francisco at all, honest. We on to the subject of today’s dev diary, or more exactly we have two separate subjects. One is decisions and laws and the other is national unity and strategic warfare. However we have touched on these subjects already so we couldn’t make a full developer diary out of them so now you get one big one.
Laws and Decisions is a concept we have taken from the EU3 expansion In Nomine. For those of you who have played In Nomine the next bit will seem slightly familiar. Decisions are historical events with a difference. Instead of the event simply firing the player can choose when to enact the decision. Secondly a decision has a double trigger block, called potential and allow. Once the potential triggers have been satisfied the decision will appear in the decision interface, but it won’t be possible to be enacted until the allow block is also satisfied. However the decision interface will tell the player exactly what is required of them to be able to enact the decision. This has two distinct game play advantages; firstly the player doesn’t have to search though hundreds of event files just to find out how to annex Austria, the game will tell them. Secondly major historical event no longer will fire on a certain dates. Although this doesn’t prevent historical hindsight it does remove the more obvious predictability of the event system. No longer will the Anschluss event fire on the 1st of March 1938 there is now a certain amount of uncertainty. Not to say that all events have been shunted into the decision system, but the key ones have been.
Laws are like decisions, but they differ in the regard that they are not country specific, however like decisions certain conditions need to be satisfied. We use things like government ideology to influence these. For example as the world becomes a more dangerous place countries can start increasing their level of military mobilisation, which increases the total amount of manpower available and also reduces the amount of manpower units lose each day as men finish their service. However democratic states find this harder to do during peacetime. Each law has 5 separate levels but there is no restriction in when you can change a law. To give an example here, Germany overruns Poland, because of this Belgium feels more threatened by Germany and increases its mobilisation levels. A few months later Germany invades Belgium and then Belgium mobilises its manpower to the maximum level. Now this probably isn’t going to save Belgium but it does feel more realistic than Belgium having to wait another year regardless of what is happening.
Onto National Unity, this is a concept we described in the Paradox newsletter as the ability for countries to continue the fight when the war is being lost. Note there are no surrender negotiations in Hearts of Iron 3, World War II is total warfare and is fought to the finish. We have special events for specific surrenders, like the forming of Vichy France, but in general if a country’s national unity breaks then all provinces that have been captured or are linked to the capital are occupied and remainder fights on with the government in exile. Allies can help prop up countries by sending forces to support them in the fight. Basically surrender is a race between overrunning a countries provinces and allied troops arriving.
That brings us to the final piece of the puzzle, Strategic warfare, we already mentioned that strategic warfare can be used to lower national unity. It is now perfectly feasible to bomb Rotterdam and induce the Dutch to surrender. Basically uncontested strategic warfare will lower national unity. Note with the surrender logic being what it is bombing a country that still holds all its provinces (say like bombing Ploesti in Romania) won’t actually make the country surrender, you still need troops on the ground. However it will make the country become more vulnerable to surrender, meaning it won’t hold on as long once things start to go bad. Basically strategic warfare sort of works like this, each successful attack reduces national unity, each defence increases national unity. If there is a successful attack that is still defended the net effect is 0. Nukes are like really big strategic attacks and have a large hit on national unity.
Here’s a screen shot for you to discuss.
Here is a part of a file for modders to look at.
common\minister_types.txt
Well with GDC over for another year so it is once back to sunny Stockholm, not missing the weather in San Francisco at all, honest. We on to the subject of today’s dev diary, or more exactly we have two separate subjects. One is decisions and laws and the other is national unity and strategic warfare. However we have touched on these subjects already so we couldn’t make a full developer diary out of them so now you get one big one.
Laws and Decisions is a concept we have taken from the EU3 expansion In Nomine. For those of you who have played In Nomine the next bit will seem slightly familiar. Decisions are historical events with a difference. Instead of the event simply firing the player can choose when to enact the decision. Secondly a decision has a double trigger block, called potential and allow. Once the potential triggers have been satisfied the decision will appear in the decision interface, but it won’t be possible to be enacted until the allow block is also satisfied. However the decision interface will tell the player exactly what is required of them to be able to enact the decision. This has two distinct game play advantages; firstly the player doesn’t have to search though hundreds of event files just to find out how to annex Austria, the game will tell them. Secondly major historical event no longer will fire on a certain dates. Although this doesn’t prevent historical hindsight it does remove the more obvious predictability of the event system. No longer will the Anschluss event fire on the 1st of March 1938 there is now a certain amount of uncertainty. Not to say that all events have been shunted into the decision system, but the key ones have been.
Laws are like decisions, but they differ in the regard that they are not country specific, however like decisions certain conditions need to be satisfied. We use things like government ideology to influence these. For example as the world becomes a more dangerous place countries can start increasing their level of military mobilisation, which increases the total amount of manpower available and also reduces the amount of manpower units lose each day as men finish their service. However democratic states find this harder to do during peacetime. Each law has 5 separate levels but there is no restriction in when you can change a law. To give an example here, Germany overruns Poland, because of this Belgium feels more threatened by Germany and increases its mobilisation levels. A few months later Germany invades Belgium and then Belgium mobilises its manpower to the maximum level. Now this probably isn’t going to save Belgium but it does feel more realistic than Belgium having to wait another year regardless of what is happening.
Onto National Unity, this is a concept we described in the Paradox newsletter as the ability for countries to continue the fight when the war is being lost. Note there are no surrender negotiations in Hearts of Iron 3, World War II is total warfare and is fought to the finish. We have special events for specific surrenders, like the forming of Vichy France, but in general if a country’s national unity breaks then all provinces that have been captured or are linked to the capital are occupied and remainder fights on with the government in exile. Allies can help prop up countries by sending forces to support them in the fight. Basically surrender is a race between overrunning a countries provinces and allied troops arriving.
That brings us to the final piece of the puzzle, Strategic warfare, we already mentioned that strategic warfare can be used to lower national unity. It is now perfectly feasible to bomb Rotterdam and induce the Dutch to surrender. Basically uncontested strategic warfare will lower national unity. Note with the surrender logic being what it is bombing a country that still holds all its provinces (say like bombing Ploesti in Romania) won’t actually make the country surrender, you still need troops on the ground. However it will make the country become more vulnerable to surrender, meaning it won’t hold on as long once things start to go bad. Basically strategic warfare sort of works like this, each successful attack reduces national unity, each defence increases national unity. If there is a successful attack that is still defended the net effect is 0. Nukes are like really big strategic attacks and have a large hit on national unity.
Here’s a screen shot for you to discuss.
Here is a part of a file for modders to look at.
common\minister_types.txt
Код:
# If you add types, and use those tags, do not change them without changing everywhere they are used.
# Uses all 'modifiers' possible thats exported as a Modifier.
apologetic_clerk = {
drift_speed = -0.05
}
administrative_genius = {
global_ic = 0.1
}
battle_fleet_proponent = {
decay = { naval_engineering = -0.25 }
}
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