Hearts of Iron 3 Dev Diary No. 6

Johan Andersson checks in again to talk HoI3.

Hello everybody, and welcome to the sixth chapter of the Hearts of Iron 3 development diary.  It has been another week of development with a lot of work on intelligence, diplomacy and convoys.

One aspect that has changed in the game since we last talked is the resources. After long consideration, we decided to make logistics and convoys work more intuitively by splitting 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 that depend on your total IC and your refinery technologies.

So, now that those details are out of the way, let's 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 - in particular, politics. We felt that the Hearts of Iron 2 event-heavy system didn't do quite what we wanted due to its static nature, which made it harder to react to changing situations. So we aimed to set up a system that was more dynamic in nature, but also wasn't so detailed you had to spend more time on your internal politics than you did fighting wars.

To start, we now have political parties. We added in flavour names for the major political parties in the world. Thus, instead of the U.S. having the Social Liberals in power in 1936, it will have the Democrat Party (although the country's ideology will still be Social Liberal). We have also defined different government types which determine when a country has an election and who is elected. Thus, in the U.S., it is the Head of State who is elected, while it is Head of Government who stands for election in the U.K. We felt these nice little changes would add a bit of flavor to the countries.

However, the first big change is a concept we call party organization. This is a dynamic variable that can be altered via events and decisions and via espionage in either your home country or others. Party organization determines how well a particular ideology is organized, covering a broad brush stroke of concepts including party membership, newspaper editorial stance, the views of opinion formers in the country, and 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'état. For example, if a democracy has well organised fascist parties, then the risks of a right wing coup d'état are much greater than in a country where the fascists have no organization.

We also added the popular view, which shows how much 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 organization caps a particular party's chance of victory. Thus, even if your country's popular view is ready to elect Left Wing Radicals, if they aren't very well organized, they won't actually win. The Left Wing Radicals simply can't get the vote out or people think it is a wasted vote. There are a number of factors that influence how popular view shifts. One factor is the party organization; the parties themselves can swing the popular view their way through their campaigning ability. If you have strong 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. For example, a country aligned with the Comintern will see support rise for parties on the left.

In summary, we aimed to do away with a lot of the events. Instead, we have developed a system that reacts more to the situation, but can also be influenced by the player. You don't have to just conquer other countries - a bit of espionage can help a friendlier government come to power in your neighbors.

Johan Andersson is the Lead Designer of Hearts of Iron 3.

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