Hearts of Iron III (Release Q3 2009)

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The Hearts of Iron series has become renowned for being the biggest, most detailed and complete strategic game series on World War 2 ever made. Hearts of Iron 3 will follow that tradition closely while focusing on satisfying veteran players through a multitude of brand new features and systems, including a huge map with more than 10,000 provinces.

It's clear this is a game that fans of our titles have been eagerly anticipating", commented Johan Andersson, Head of Development at Paradox Interactive. "Before revealing the project, our upcoming announcement online forum received more than 14,000 page views in less than 24 hours with a third installment of Hearts of Iron seemingly being at the top of everyone's wish list."

Hearts of Iron 3 is scheduled for release in Q3

Hearts of Iron 3 TRAILER

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10,000 provinces, the Hearts of Iron 3 map has over 10,000 land provinces. To put this in perspective there were exactly 2608 total provinces in Hearts of Iron 2. We didn't do this just to add more; we could of added 100, 200 maybe even a 1,000 more provinces and went there you go Hearts of Iron 3 gives you more. In fact when came to set up the number of provinces we had no hard number in mind, 10,000 was just the result. However we knew we wanted a bigger map with more provinces and to do this we had to solve a number of technical problems. However we are rather pleased that we have managed to create a map that is 9 times bigger (the length and breadth have been increased by 3 times) without everyone having to go out and buy the very latest graphics cards. We've also achieved this without having to compromise on the modability of the map, for those of you who enjoyed modding or playing mods on the EU3 or Rome map, Hearts of Iron 3 will be able to offer you the same.

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I am going to talk about the production system, which is the core of the economics in HoI3. Hearts of Iron is a game focused on re-figthing WW2, where economy matters, but is not the main focus of the game. When we increase complexity in HoI3, it will primarily be at the warfare and logistics part of the game. We are keeping the IC system that was so successful in the previous incarnations of the series, where you decide what you want to produce centrally, and allocate IC on consumer goods, supplies, upgrades, reinforcement and production.

However, some aspects have changed, for what we think will create a much more realistic and balanced gameplay.

First up, we've added efficency as a concept for resource extraction, and for the output of resources per IC. This will create strategic possibilites of improving your industry in certain aspects.

However perhaps the biggest change is to gearing. Rather than having you stick on long production queues that become more efficient over time, a country has a number of practical values representing its accumulated experience in producing certain types of equipment. These decay over time, so to keep yourself up to date you need to keep continually producing equipment of this type. Now a rather interesting consequence of this rule is that let's say you are Germany, you have focussed all out on land and air units and you have conquered Russia so now you are going to sink all your IC into building ships. You're production will be initially be much less efficient until your economy reorients towards naval production.

Another interesting thing is that production effects technology, the more of something you produce the easier it is to research in that area. So if you want to advance technology in an area (say carriers) you are going to want to keep producing carriers to pick up the research bonus. Yes no more tech rushing, those early model carriers may not be that good but they will serve as a nice test bed for design ideas.

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With Hearts of Iron 2 we brought in the tech team, this gave us country specialisations; Germany was good at certain things, the US good at others. Which was good, however its weakness was that these were hard coded, Germany could never be good at aircraft carriers no matter how hard it tried, and the US would always be good at aircraft carriers no matter how little effort it put in. Also with the more streamlined system we also lost the ability to differentiate between the technology focuses of countries more. Our goals were three parts, keep the clarity of the Hearts of Iron 2 system, make the system more dynamic in that your technology abilities would evolve and try to bring back in as much of the different units that the Hearts of Iron system offered.

The sad result is that tech teams could not feature in our new system. We liked them, we really wanted to keep them but just couldn't find a way to accommodate them in the system. What we have replaced them with are various theory and practical values representing the accumulated research knowledge and practical experience a country has in various fields. These can be defined for a country at the start, thus giving us the initial specialisations that the tech teams in Hearts of Iron 2 offered, but as these values increase and decay according to what a country is doing. Thus we have a system that dynamically evolved according to how you decide to steer the country. As was mentioned in the previous dev dairy practical values are gained from building things while theoretical knowledge is gained from research. In general practical experience gives larger bonuses than theoretical. If take the Soviet Union as an example here, the Soviet union will be set up with it theoretical and practical experience in areas like tanks, with very little in naval. However if the player wishes (foolishly some would say) to turn the Soviet Union into a naval power by putting more production and research focus into ships they are free to do so. The more the do so the better the Soviet Union will become at building and researching ships. But at the cost of steadily loses its abilities in fields like armour.

What should also have noticed here that we no longer have models, instead we have technologies that increase the maximum values a unit can have and if unit can upgrade to these values it will. This allows us to do really nice things like divide up what would be a single technology that gave in a model in Hearts of Iron 2 in several separate techs. So if we take tanks here as example, you can separately research a tank gun, tank engine, tank armour and tank reliability (just for the record reliability effects the ability for the tank unit to withstand damage on the attack, unreliable tanks tend to break down). How we set these values can give a countries tanks brigades with different values with out the straight jacket of the nation specific unit. Take the early war British heavy tank brigade, well armoured, slow, under gunned and prone to breakdowns. We can create this effect through out technology system, but also giving the player the freedom to steer his country the way he wishes.

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we introduce the concept of leadership; this represent educated people who live in your country. They are used for research, diplomacy, espionage and your officer corps.

Before going into more detail let's talk a little about our philosophy. It all comes down to what we feel makes for good strategy. Strategy demands clear-cut long-term choices. Our goal is that you the player should be weighing up your options carefully and not just be reacting to short term considerations. If you want to go all out on research you should be able to do so, however as with real life there should also be a price to pay.

These aren't just the top the university graduates, in fact it is the exact opposite. If we look at the Manhattan project there were over 130,000 people working on it and not all of these went onto to win a Nobel Prize for Physics. All research projects in our time frame relied on these support people to make them happen, and this is Leadership. The top graduates are represented by your nations accumulated theory value and can only give you benefits for projects where their skills apply, while the clerks, secretaries, draftsmen, chemists, physics etc. who are the unsung heroes of wartime research, they can work anywhere.

In order to make our task of game balance easier these leadership points are consumed when you do research. We do acknowledge that the people you assign to projects will become steadily more experienced and don't just disappear and this is also held as your accumulated theory value. The more you research in an area the less leadership points you will need to advance in a field. Similarly for practical values, having a number of tanks to work with already means you need to expend less effort to advance in a field.

I also mention the officer corps, to put your minds at rest the divisional level and above leaders you had in Hearts of Iron and Hearts of Iron 2 are still there. These represent the Officers and NCOs below divisional rank. These are the men supplied the glue that held your divisions together. As you invest more in leadership your divisions can take more punishment. Taking casualties, building more troops, plus the occasional officer purge will mean your units will fall apart more easily in combat.

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Today we’ll talk about basics of the land combat system in HoI3.

Land combat, in our opinion, forms the centrepiece of Hearts of Iron 3; the whole game revolves around your ability to take provinces from other countries. Thus combat was an area we put a lot of thought into and the basic system was one of the first game features we coded in. Our overall goal was to take what was an already good combat system and make it better.

First up, move is still attack. It worked in Hearts of Iron 2 and we felt no reason to change to this basic system. However what we have done is that if you are fighting you suffer a movement penalty. Which can be increased or decreased according to combat events. Now using small units to try and delay an enemy is an option. However due to the unpredictability of combat you don't know in advance how successful they will be.

A large stack is no guarantee of victory, not all these units will be able to fight and there is a chance that not all of them will even get a chance to fight. Combat should become much more unpredictable, and quality should be as important as quantity. You might blitz your enemy or you might end up in a grinding attritional fight that drags on, the goal is to remove the I win option out of combat and make your strategy much more important than the size of the stacks, because the people on the home front want victory not super stacks.

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After long consideration, we decided to make logistics and convoys work more intuitively so we splitted up oil into crude oil and fuel. Crude Oil is now produced in provinces and converted from energy while fuel is consumed by units. Fuel is created out of Crude Oil in amounts depending on your total IC and your refinery technologies every day.

So, now when that is out of the way, lets talk in detail about Politics.

Although Hearts of Iron 3 is a war game and our main focus is on the war aspect we felt we could not neglect the home front and in particular politics. We felt the Hearts of Iron 2 event heavy system didn't do quite what we wanted due to its static nature, making it harder to react to changing situation. So we aimed to set up a system that was more dynamic in nature but wasn't so detailed you spent more time on your internal politics than you did fighting wars.

To start with we now have political parties. We are added in flavour names for the major political parties in the world. Thus instead of America having the Social Liberals in power in 1936 it will have the Democrat Party, although the countries ideology will still be Social Liberal. We also have different government types defined, that determine when a country has an election and who is elected. Thus US it is the Head of State who is elected, while in the UK the Head of Government who stands for election. We felt this nice little changes would add a bit of flavour to the countries.

However the first big change is a concept we call party organisation. This is a dynamic variable that can be altered via espionage in either your home country or others and via events and decisions. This represents how well a particular ideology is organised, covering a broad brush stroke of concepts from party membership, newspaper editorial stance, the views of opinion formers in the country, actual campaigners going out trying to convince people to support them, just give you an idea. For an ideology group that is out of power it also reflects the chances of a coup d'etat, if a democracy has well organised fascist parties then the risks of a right wing coup d'etat are much greater than in a country where they have simply no organisation.

We also have the popular view, this shows the support each party has, think of it as a sort of opinion poll question if there was an election today how would you vote? However the party organisation then caps a particular party's chance of victory. Thus even if your country's popular view is ready to elect Left Wing Radicals, but they aren't very well organised they won't actually win. The Left Wing Radicals simply can't get the vote out or people think it is wasted vote, etc. There are a number of factors that influence how popular view shifts, here are a few to give you some flavour. The party organisation is one factor; the parties themselves through their campaigning ability can swing the popular view their way. If you have revanchism (i.e. cores on other countries) then this will up support for right wing nationalist parties. Dissent moves the popular view away from the current governing ideology. The countries current diplomatic alignment will also influence the support of parties, a country aligned with Comintern will see support rise for parties on the left.

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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.

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.

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Op vrijdag 12 december 2008 15:38 schreef Netsplitter het volgende:
Zeer mooie OP.
Maar ben je niet een beetje te vroeg??

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Voor mensen die niet vies zijn van een diepe strategiegame die zich afspeelt in de Tweede Wereldoorlog is er de Hearts of Iron-serie. Paradox is al tijdje bezig aan het derde deel in de serie, waarin weer een hoop vernieuwingen zullen plaatsvinden. Zo vlak voor de feestdagen heeft de ontwikkelaar nog een laatste developer diary beschikbaar gesteld, waarin uitgebreid wordt gepraat over de zeegevechten in de game. Hierin wordt gepraat over de modellen van de schepen, de technologische details en upgrades en de mogelijkheden tot het geven van commando's. Ook heeft Paradox twee nieuwe screenshots van de game vrijgegeven, gemaakt in de alpha-versie.

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Op vrijdag 19 december 2008 13:40 schreef witte_fantasie het volgende:

[..]

Nou ik word er niet wijs uit wat voor game het nu precies is...

Lijkt het op de Total War series ofzo? Of meer op Anno, Europa Universalis bijvoorbeeld?

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Here's the first of a few ingame videoclips we've planned to release

This is the description for this one:

The clip is showcasing France 1939, the war has begun and the French troops are massing on its eastern frontier preparing to repel the inevitable German invasion.
However France does have diplomatic options to strengthen its defences. Buying production licences can allow the French army access to better equipment or perhaps transfer troops to allied command for joint operations could improve the position. Diplomacy is just another continuation of politics...

Check it out