HOI 3 Gameplay Help

This shot is the factors of this battle taken from the Japanese side. Here you can see weather is effecting -10% of there battle rating, put it is being countered by +10% of Experience and +10% of there leaders skill level. However all this is also being countered by -20% of an envelopment penalty. This being represented by the two red arrows at the top.





IN this shot you can see the battle window is somewhat different, where the other screenshots show a no event in the middle at the top, this one shows what is happening in the battle, this one is an Ambush by the defending forces against my own attacking forces. As you can see, by holding the mouse over the event name in shows what effects this has, in this instance it is a -25% to my attack rating. These events will eventually end and it will return to no event and the battle will continue. These events can be influenced by your techs and doctrines increasing, breakthrough chances, ambushes, tactical retreats, encirclements, assaults, withdrawals and others, each one giving different effects to each side.

You can also see just above this ambush indicator the line of battle factors, a new one is there that was not before, dissent. As I have said this is basically the morale of your men and country.



IN this one you can see my unit being attacked, with the enemy pushing up to 80% before being halted, you can also see some words near the unit, this says (in yellow) ground attack, and (in red) Encirclement. This is a quick reference to show the player what events are happening in each battle without actually viewing the battle windows. So the enemy has commenced a ground attack role against my units as well as encircled my men, I will probably lose that battle and be forced to retreat.

Here is the games definition of dissent.



A screenshot of the organisation of my unit. This basically means when you attack your men get lost, different parts of the front advance faster then others, mechanized units out reach there infantry, so it resembles it as organisation, as the overall organisation of the unit. Once the unit retreats from combat or breaks off an attack the men as you would understand are all over the battlefield and you must wait until the men are back are there required posts before you can continue, this all of course happens automatically. You can increase both overall organisation and the speed at which it returns my advancing specific techs. Such as one infantry tech will give you +15 org, thus it increase the overall organisation of all infantry based units by +15. This is one of the most important parts of battle.



This one shows the three different colours of the attacks. In this particular one however both the green and red are the attack performance of Japanese Aircraft onto my troops, this you can tell because there are Japanese planes over my forces. There ratio is based on my fighter level, AA fire, your division AA ability, terrain, and weather, you can view the aircraft battle much the same as an ground battle by clicking the unit and the battle name at the bottom of the unit window, and you can see all the factors in the battle, Sorry I forgot this screenshot.

Also you can see that all my screenshots are taken with the simplified Terrain button clicked, this is the easiest way to wage land battles as you can see the terrain, obviously sending tanks over mountain areas is a bad idea and this will cause serious penalties and a simply Garrison division may be able to hold them up due to the terrain.



This shot shows the toolbar on the right side of the map. This is used to show the player all the units in your army, and the current battles they are involved in, showing it by the numbers on the campaign map next to there names and the colour. By holding the mouse over any of the battles in shows you details of the battle. If the unit is not in combat it shows the supply levels of that division or HQ.

 

This one shows a unit retreating from battle to the nearest providence. Because I retreated manually (I ordered them to retreat), the unit is still greatly intact and so is the organisation of the unit, often this is a good idea if you mean to use the unit again soon.

Something I didn't go over in the other posts is the colour of the arrows.

Green, means simply movement or redeployment.
Red, means attack or engagement.
White, means retreating unit.

 

Thank you so much; you really have a great understanding of HOI3.

I appreciate that you looked at the conflict from Nationalist China's perspective.

You've given me a lot to digest. I can see that there are many fundemental things which I have done wrong or not taken into account.

Perhaps I would be better off playing a power such as Germany but Nationalist China helps you to understand the value of how to prioritize for conflict.

The tutorial I played through prioritizes increasing the production capability and military leadership through the research choices. It really didn't say too much on building an army; from what was said I assumed that there was enough army to defeat Japan without any buildup. Here is the walkthrough; Your first game - HoI3Wiki

Nationalist China is quite challenging to say the least.

I have to believe that your assistance will be helpful to many people who are getting into this challenging game. Thank you again!

 

What I could see with Nationalist China is that they simply don't have a strong enough army, they lack infantry divisions of any kind, doctrines, air support, and armoured units. So you are required to fix that up and hopefully lure the Japanese in, and cut there supply lines.

The game is best played from 1936 as the you can chose your own path in the game. You can decide to build what best fits your plan, and not what either historically done or what the game wants you to have at 1939.

 

It worked!!!!......I am late am I......

 

Just a correction to the Width. I read some more up on this and if the battle window indicates a width of 5, then this is the length of the battle field, our how man available 'slots' are there that can be used by divisions on each side.

Each battle only has a certain amount of "slots" that can be filled, or basically how many of your units can be involved in the battle at one time. This is why sometimes when you attack, you will see that only a 2 brigades out of your 4 are attacking. The combat width of each Division dictates how many units your leader can have at the front at a single time, while the battle width indicates a total amount possible from your side.

If there is an available 'slot' at the front, then and only then can a reserve unit be brought into the battle, but again this is random and may not always happen even if the spot is available. If a unit's organisation gets to low it will be forced to pull out of the battle making a spot available to any other units.

 

How come no supplys moving through?i checked every thing and nothing happens.

 

You need to give us as much information as you can relating to your problem. So where are you trying to supply too? Across land or sea, or both? Do you have any supplies actually transport(you can see this up the top). Are you being affected by partisans or dissent? Do you simply have too many divisions and not enough Transport IC's to move your supplies around? (Transport IC is based on your production IC's, I am not sure of the exact ratio, but for every production IC it gives you something like 5 Transport IC, this resembles trucks, trains, barges and other means of transports for your supplies.

If you click on the 'Supplies' button on the bottom right of the campaign map it brings up all your supply lines, and which units are supplied based on colour, light green is good, darker green about 80%, yellow around 50%, red is well anywhere from 0 to around 35%, this will also tell you which unit is supplied, whether the supplies are getting to the providence's around the unit, but not getting to the actual unit. For example there may be enough trucks to get it to the depo at the providence but the infrastructure may be too low to get the supplies to your units in the field.

 

I'm running into a bit of a supply related issue myself which I will get to eventually.

I am on the verge of winning my 1st offensive battle. As you hopefully can see from my attachment I am well into the green and most likely will win the battle soon. The battle was 3 units vs 1 enemy unit. The battle fluctuated back and forth. I started around 58% in the yellow, dropped to 23% in red, but once I got my 4th unit in the fray my percentage has increasingly grown.

After Japan captured Shanxi all of Japan's units disappeared from view. Prior to this I could see a solid Japanese line. (The units disappeared I'm thinking because I'm on foreign ground). One of my attacking units is on Japan's defending square. I don't believe I have any better chance of winning my 3rd trial against Japan, but at least it appears I'll win my 1st offensive battle! As you suggested I did leave one unit behind out of the initial attacking stack to hold ground should things have gone wrong.

One problem I believe I am facing in this battle is with bad supply. This might actually be what I've been struggling with every time I try this. My units are very hesitant to move where they are told. If I'm not mistaken this is because they are out of supply?!? I displayed my map with the supply background so you can see what the supply route looks like. It appears my supply route wants to snake from my territory into my army from the left. Does green mean good? I'm confused because all my units say they are out of supply. This seems unusual to me because we're just a jump and skip out of Nationalist China.

I could build a infrastructure land bridge but the cost and time involved would be staggering.

I'll have to say this has got me perplexed, but something caught my eye from one of your screenshots. You have a ton of HQ units. I have only the 2 HQ I started the scenario with. Did you build the massive amount of HQ's so you could gain their leadership benefit's? Do you have several leaders with Logistics? HQ units are not built for the battlefield; are they a cost effective unit that should be mass produced?


In my previous trial I did build a 4 star HQ. When you click on it, there is a place where it is catergorized as only a single star; even after it is full strength. I noticed that this shows up in your last screenshot (Hunan Hubei only shows 1 star). Any idea what this might signify? I thought it meant this HQ in some way wasn't full strength.

View attachment 9963

 

I have recently discovered something related to the supply lines and supply issues I thought I would share.

There has been a lot of problems in this game about supply problems and the fact that your men always run out.

Well the main points about supply is that the infrastructure of all your Providences in your supply chain from your capital to your front lines need to be high, as soon as one is low say 20% the entire supply line beyond that providence will also be 20% regardless of the level of infrastructure in the later Providences in the supply chain, think of it like an accident on a highway and the effects before, during and after the accident.

The best way to correct this is simply to upgrade the infrastructure of the Providences, this however can take a while.

Secondly, my constantly attacking the enemy lines without giving the supply lines time to catch up means your supplies never get the chance to reorganize effectively so you will see the nice little green supply line indicator snaking through your providences slower then normal thus meaning your troops begin to run out of supplies.

The best way to counter this as well as the one above is once an attack has broken through a line, you have encircled the enemy and gained some territory, and supplies are beginning to get thinner you need to stop for a few days and allow the supplies to catch up.

Thirdly, Multiple fronts cause issues. Although you may have plenty of transports and trucks, the infrastructure leading out of your capital can only support a certain amount of trucks at once, and this capital stockpile supplies both directly to land bound troops as well as the support depots set up across sea lanes. However if front A needs 100 trucks a day, front B needs 50 trucks a day, and front c needs 50 trucks a day and the occupied countries require 10 trucks a day, this means that you require a total of 210 trucks a day to keep all forces fully supplied at a standing position (not attacking). However if you highway in the capital can only carry 100 trucks a day, either all of your forces will run at a 50% rate, or half will run at 100% and the other half at 0%, just as explained above in.

Basically you can not simply have a huge amount of troops at once, and if you do you can not attack with all of them at once, you need to slow down the advance or simply move forward then stop, then move again.

Hope this helps.

Also, something some of you might not know, is that every unit in the game, regardless of supply levels, or the unit selected, as long as it starts at 100% supplies has enough supplies for a 30 battle and only then will run out of supplies, this is to illustrate building up of supplies, and who you don't run out of supplies to later. So keep that in mind when the snaking supply line has not reached your units, but you still seem to have supplies, for eventually the fuel will run out and your units will be left stranded.

Supplies also do not only mean that if effects fuel and supplies, it also effects reinforcements and also you organisation of your units does not increase either, keep that in mind as well.

 

If you are attacking via a sea invasion a port is a must, and the infrastructure as well as the level of the port define the amount of supplies capable of being passed through, so if the port is severely damaged by enemy aircraft, no supplies are getting through.

I forgot to add, that HQ set ups also play a role in supply levels, if your unit is either out of contact with its HQ or just does not have one, this effects the amount of supplies and reinforcements it will receive, so it is important to keep the unit connected to a HQ, do not let them fend for themselves, it is kind of like that old saying about artillery and air support.

'Sending troops into battle without the proper air or artillery support is like sending a child out in the rain without an umbrella, it is just stupid'

Hope all this helps.

 

Long time no see, but I have a burning problem.

1936 Campaign, United Kingdom, Normal Difficulty.

I took complete military control, because I figured the UK would not have that many divisions. Anyway, so I built up, instead of numbers, a small group of highly trained, regular divisions. In September 1939 I had the 4th Army in Egypt, made out of two Corps of 3 and 2 divisions, to cover the North African Coast. The 5th Army was based in Sudan, and had three Corps of 3 and 3 divisions, plus a Corps of 4 militia divisions. The Indian Army was just a reorganization of the many divisions in India, concentrated around the major port cities and the Eastern border. These forces stayed exactly the same for three years, as its now 1942, and Italy and Japan are still not at war with me, although they are Axis.

This is my problem. I have the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 6th, and 7th Armies (the 7th is about half strength). Each army has three Corps, each corps with 3 divisions, and each containing either a few anti-tank or tank destroyer brigades or an armored division.

After holding out for a two years, fighting off a German landing in Scotland and Northern Ireland, the Germans finally invaded Russia, and the Americans finally involved themselves in the war. The Germans had conquered Spain as well, so their empire was coast to Russian border. The war with Russia drew away their coastal defenses, leaving options for invasions. I conducted a cross-channel invasion with 3 armies, all well commanded, and I quickly took both Cherbourg and Brest, the port cities. My technology is militarily up to date with infantry, supply, artillery, and doctrine, and only a little bit behind in armor. I have the largest air force in the world, for sure, with over 110 squadrons. Theyve seriously bombed the German infrastructure and military forces, but for some confounding reason, the Germans keep bringing up fresh divisions, without losing ground on the Russian front. I keep losing ground, even with an entire Corps in one province.

I fell back again and again, using huge fleets of transports to evacuate entire armies at once. I tried two more times, with similar results. I reached Paris once, but lost it within three days to a counterattack with 2 mere German divisions.

The Americans landed a few times in Bordeaux, and once in the Netherlands, but they only committed a handful of divisions, and fell back. They refuse to give me expeditionary forces, unlike Canada, who has already granted me two Corps. It is infuriating to muster over 160 divisions, and still be unable to crack a poorly defended Atlantic Wall.

My troops are trained, equipped, supplied, and commanded. What's wrong? It's obviously my military strategy. So...any suggestions? Preferably before Russia crumbles. (It's already lost Leningrad).

 

Well we can't make an opinion on your strategy as we don't know that your doing, perhaps you could enlighten us on that.

Also there is a problem (Which the makers acknowledge) of the AI simple using up his entire ,manpower, and doing what is called super stacking. Bascially he gets some 40 divisions on each providence adjacent to an enemy one. The only way to beat him is simply be far more technologically advanced, attempt to break through a weak section of his line and encircle as many as possible and slowly lower the troop numbers or simply ground attack his forces unit they are so low in strength they simply errode away when attacked by infantry, since he doesn't have any manpower he can't replenish his units enough to matter in a time of war.

To see if the manpower is the case load up the game as the German side, and have a look at his manpower, don't touch anything though or change anything as this defeats the purpose of the game, but just have a look at what I am talking about.

 

Also Soar I have the same problem vs Russia and I am Germany, if you check out my AAR you can see how bad and how long the problem of super stacks can go on for, and what it takes to break the enemy.

Here is a screenshot. You can see the super stacks and it is like this all down the front.

 

From my experience the game is ridiculously biased in favor of the Germans. Their units always seem to be EXTREMELY powerful, and the can seemingly pull a massive amount of troops out of their ass.

 

Mussolini and I were running into supply issues big time. We simply tried taking Siam from China and the Out Of Supplies message seemed to continously haunt us.

He told me something that I never realized before. I thought the trade routes were essentially convoy transport ships. I never built any convoy transport ships. He said that they are what connected together supplies at the ports you have.

If you create convoy transport ships does that in itself allow you to keep a port in supply?

 

Mussolini is right, the convoy transport vessels ship both your war materials from other ports but also ship the supplies from port to port not accessible by land. These should automatically create themselves and begin to ship the required amount once a port is taken. This means the port is supplied but does not mean the providence in which the port is is in supply. This is to do with the reasons mention above, basically just because you can get the supplies from the ship to the dock it doesn't mean you can get it from the dock to out of the city or even the front line..