HOI 3 Gameplay Help

Ok I made more divisions and pushed them back now I can't brake throught there border......

 

O I can't out flank it because I tryed that going through Belgium or luxemberg or somthing makes Britain war me I don't need that kind of trouble.

 

The maginot line is to date(in terms of HOI) probably the most defensible place in the HOI world. The only way you are going to break through that line with a straight forward attack is with combined arms of amour and infantry with probably about 30 odd divisions, close air support, complete air superiority a week or so and a lot of luck. Hence why historically the Germans went through the low countries.

The only other options are perhaps attack from Italy, or perhaps a naval invasion from the English channel by passing the entire defences and straight into Paris, this move alone will force them to pull huge amounts of men from the front lines, so your invasion force will need to consist of quite a few divisions.

 

Ok I am going to try to get Italy In the war and try to invade Brest.

 

I don't know if I Am strong enough because the French navy is pretty strong.

 

Thank you so much for your help in visually describing this game better. I haven't gone through everything thorough yet but the HQ description is very helpful. After lunch I will give this a good looking over.

I would like to try attaching a picture of my military organization (or disorganization), because I'm not sure if I'm set up very well. As I mentioned above something happened to my Guam HQ units in which my 6x unit transported back to the US. If the picture comes accross you will see that the event in question eliminated my entire Guam HQ led theater.

View attachment 9723

 

Tomcat: A picture absolutely is worth a thousand words. Thank you for taking the time to show some concepts within this game through your game screenshots.

There were some interesting things to note;
-You've absolutely run into the same red out of supply condition that I've run into. It is good to know that this in itself doesn't make a crisis, it's just that there is nothing tradeworthy to pass through the ports. I have on several occasions run into the red routes on the bottom of the Production screen, but other times they can all be green and I'll still have red routes.
-I see that your army is very structured. In my situation there are a ton of HQ units in the CORPS size and not very many infantry units. The strategy guide suggests it may be beneficial to disband HQ units to uncover more manpower. I am tempted to pare down the ammount of HQ units. On the other hand I wish there were a few more ARMY GROUP sized HQ units so I could split each theater in 2. Is it possible to promote a unit from CORPS level to ARMY GROUP level? If so I'd love to revamp the order. I chatted with Mussolini and he also helped me understand the HQ hierarchy.
-I started up another game with the express purpose of researching Infantry, Artillery, Armor, and Mobile Armor so I could accelerate my Technology field research. Unfortunately it appears that I didn't get the "Practical" bonus's that I expected. I'm going to go back through my save games to see whether I did or didn't reduce the "Practical" build penalty. I hate researching techs with red numbers applied to the research time. Am I missing something?
-Lastly; from the HQ chart (1st picture attachments) I see a statement that says; "You cannot have a Theatre in Allied controlled territory. Does anyone know what that means?

 

By promote do you mean remove the Corp HQ completely so you structure will be Div - Army or add an Army HQ to you corp such as Div - Army Group?



To have the structure Div - Army - Corp you simply have to select the division you want and click the detach button which in the screenshot above is the button in the window on the right that looks like a red arrow with three rectangle boxs behind it. Once you click it that unit will then be detached from its HQ and be completely independent.

To attach simply click on the button again (which has now turned green and the arrow reversed pointing towards the rectangle box's). Once you detach the unit another button will also show up next to detach button which will have a certain amount of X's on it depending on the unit you currently have selected. If you have a Div selected then the button will be XXX, and if you have a Corp XXX selected the button will be XXXX, by clicking this button it will create a new HQ for that unit and directly attach your unit to that HQ, you then must attach that HQ you just created to its own HQ.

If you want to make a Division XX attached directly an army HQ XXXX you need to detach the Division from its current Corp XXX HQ. Select the XXX HQ and create a new XXXX HQ (if one does not exist) and then disband the XXX if not needed. Then simply select your Div XX and simply click the attach button. A list of all available HQ's will pop up for this unit, from XXX all the way to XXXXXX in order or who is closest, and you all have to do is select the HQ you want.

Is that confusing enough?

Each nation is based on its historical one, so the only bonus's you will get are those that were historically for that country. Otherwise you will have have to research the threories behind them and increase it that way.

You can't wage a war in someone's backyard basically. So if you are in a allied country then it is the Allies theatre and you are support for them.

 

I read the other day that if you run out of Generals it is because your country simply doesn't have that many generals historically. However for most countries they get an influx of generals and research points at the beginning of every year.

 

At 1st what you said didn't make any sense, but when I followed what you said all the way through I was very happy to see that this method actually creates progressively larger HQ's!!!

I was able to link every unit within a structure doing this. I even was able to assign a leader to each HQ.

Only one thing I'm a bit baffled with; what do the resulting "?'s" on each unit mean. Does this mean the unit needs reinforced to get it to strength?

View attachment 9788

 

I was almost confusing myself.

That is what happens when you see an enemy unit but you don't know what it is. The large question mark in the white box is becuase you don't know what kind of division it is. ie. Inf, Arm, Arty so on.

The smaller question marks underneath are because you don't know what units it is comprised of.

In terms of it being allied, this happens when you first create a new HQ, it is simply showing you that the unit is still being formed and organised for basic deployment. The big question mark means it is yet to be fully assigned as a HQ, give maybe 1 day and it should change to a HQ symbol.

Be careful with the HQ's in battle as well. Especially newly formed ones, because once they are first formed they only have around 150 men, and over time they are reinforced to the standard 3000 but that takes time.

 

One thing that surprises me with this particular RTS game is how little research has been done to document Research Times as effected by Production and prior Research itself. I started a thread on the HOI forum, but as of so far no one really seems to know a whole lot about it. I don't want to knock people's responses but the statement "that level of detail is one you probably don't have to worry about in this game." seems to sum it up. Why is there so little research done with this game in optimizing build times?

I don't know "anything" about this game but it seems to me that you would want to have your research optimized so you will be ready to deal with a threat. Let's say Japan hits the Phillipines in 1939 wouldn't it be nice to be waiting with divisions of Marines, Mountain Troops and artillery toting Calvary?

Starting with a strategy in mind and looking ahead to what I'd like to be ready with; the little experiment I have been conducting is how long it would take to start building Marines.

Since I couldn't find any stat modifying material or how to apply the stat modifiers I started a series of games with the express purpose of discovering the optimal research time for producing Marines.

Part of the challenge of this is that you just don't hit the button at the beginning of the game which says "Research Marines". There are 4 techs which have to be researched 1st, not once but twice. (So this would be 8 techs total, and 3 seperate wait layers of research).

My 1st attempt took a straight forward approach to the research.
1) By looking at the research icons I could see that there was a big practical research penalty for the 4 infantry techs which I mentioned in the last paragraph. I decided to counter this by building infantry divisions. Since I worried about the manpower issues this might impose I built these divisions as reserves.
2) I just researched all 4 infantry techs at once.

Trial 1: The results that I got wasn't what I expected: I was ready to build Marines in mid-September of 1937. My practical skill level was 2.1 for infantry which was lower than the Jan 1936 starting level of 2.5!

I was suspicious of the reserves actually depleting my skill level.

I replaced the reserves with normal infantry divisions and repeated the experiment.

Trial 2: This dropped my research time down to May of 1937! The difference was the practical skill which bumped up to 3.2.

I thought well if practical skill level can effect the results so dramatically what effect would theoretical have on research.

In order to increase my theoretical skill I would have to wait until I reseached the Infantry Theoretical skill found under the Theory tab.

To do this would mean waiting until May to even start researching the 4 infantry techs necessary to research Marines.

To do this I just added the 4 extra techs to the end of the Research cue, but didn't allocate research to them, this would make the 1st switch out easy. Of course for my 1st research cue I loaded up on all the Theoreticals I felt I would need.

I hit the go button and switched out the necessary techs when it was appropriate.

Trial 3: By the time I had Marine researched it was August of 1937. My practical level jumped to 5.7! No this did not beat the overall time of May 1937 (which was done with regular infantry), but it actually beat my 1st time trial with reserves, and I had a much better state of preparedness. If you focussed on the time between hitting the button to research the 4 infantry techs from trial 2, I shattered that time by 2 months. If you look at the time between hitting the research button for the 4 infantry techs from trial 1 the time improvement was over half a year!

Yes I do wish there was easier information available to plug in or calculate to determine the optimal research/production path, but what I discovered was quite useful to me. Not only am I grasping better orders of research but by now I am understanding the HOI interface much better. I've spent over a week getting this far. I wonder how long it will take to experience combat.

 

Although the game is considered to be extremely accurate histroically and it is claimed that you can change the face of ww2 and do as you please, this is not strickly true. The developers actually made it so that if you don't research a tech closer to the actual research date you will get a penatly depending on the year. For ex. If you attempt to research 1942 infantry in 1939 it will date upwards of 2 years to complete, however if your research 1942 infantry in 1942 it will take around 5 months regardless of your practical and theoretical skills, also if you research something from a couple of years ago then it will be even faster then normal. So you can't just run off and get say 1945 infantry in 1939, I think it was there attempt at evening the game as in history no country just focused on one tech but all of them.

 

I honestly would like a bit more freedom in the research area, honestly I'm not even sure why the game allows as much research to be done on different things as it does, a few tech's can have the date on them get up to 2,000 in a few cases, before the bar on them even fills up all the way.

 

I have been playing a Nationalist China Walkthrough. I have had my 1st taste of combat and I must say that the Japs are kicking me all around. The walkthrough suggests that Nationalist China should have the manpower to win, but I don't see it happening.

Perhaps I'm totally missing the whole concept of what I need to do. At 1st I win a few battles; I'm assuming because I have numbers and my troops are entrenched. After the Japanese pick on a province a few times it will eventually start losing. My line just gets pushed back one province after another.

Everytime I try conducting an attack I lose. I'd like to be able to take a stack of 4 divisions and just drop it on 2 defending divisions and just repel the breakthroughs. It never works even if it appears to be simple.

I've noticed that there are a lot of little messages, little quote boxes with numbers and different colored arrows appearing on the screen; I'm confused what this is all about.

I'm trying to get an intuitive handle on what's going on, but so far it's beyond me.

 

I will take some screenies for you tonight mate.

 

Awesome! I appreciate your help.

I have saved my game about a month prior to actually having combat. I've played this out and got pushed across the map. I read more information from Strat guide and tried again keeping certain concepts in mind. The things I tried differently didn't seem to have an impact.

Little things seem to have me confused. Is it OK to select units one at a time and give them all a destination of the enemy square. I do awful whenever I am doing the attacking. It feels like maybe only one of my units is being factored into the battle.

The 2nd time around I put a little more emphasis on not allowing the enemy outnumber me on sides in contact with the enemy. Even so the enemy will pull off attacks from 2 directions at once and push me back. I can't seem to pull off the same type of attack.

When do you retreat? Can you even retreat under attack? it seems that I lose control of a unit that is losing badly. Are there times when you should manually replace your troops on the front when they are losing strength?

Will reinforcements bring your army back to full strength? After war breaks out on the line I find it very hard to keep multiple IC categories from going in the red. To replace units through Production takes a long time and it only yields one unit counter at a time. To rely on that seems to be a too little too late situation.

My last try at holding the Japanese off I attempted to put together some Combined Arms units. How do I know if I've got the bonus? The unit I was thinking might give me the bonus was 3 infantry brigades combined with 1 light armor. I even recruited a special HQ so I could recruit an officer with the Panzer bonus.

 

Sorry mate didn't end up finding time to do the screenshots, but I promise once I finish with these two posts I will do them.

The manpower aspect only comes into play if you actually have recruited the Divisions to actually defeat the enemy, not if the manpower is still in the 'pool'(which is the manpower number at the top of your screen).

There a high amount of factors that come into play, I will demonstrate with the screenshots.

Same with this

 

You can select your units individually or singularly and make them attack the same target it is up to you. If you are going to get all your units to attack the same area from the same area, then it is easier to select them all, but I recommend not using them all because when you engage in battle you units suffer what is called organisation (the green bar next to the orange one in the troop detail window). If your units hit 0 they are considered to unorganised and cant attack and will instantly retreat if attacked, so that is why it is good to leave on in a providence to defend.

If you attack from more than one direction this includes, sea invasions, air assaults, encirclements and other flanking maneuvers then you automatically get either a two front attack bonus depending of the two fronts, this increases you units attack ratio's, and lowers the enemies defend ratio, making it more likely the attacker will win.

Your loss can also depend on what units both you and your enemy have. IF he has tanks and you have nothing but infantry you will lose. If you have AT guns that makes it more likely you will defend easier, but doesn't mean you will win. Experience, terrain, supply, national dissent, Military Doctrines, Generals and there traits, Ministers, Weather, Infrastructure, Unit Make Up, Unit's model year (such as 1939 infantry,) air support or lack of, organisation, unit strength and over stacking all play vital parts in a battle and contribute to either a loss or a win.

Retreating is up to you and your personal goal at the time. Do you want to hold the line as long as possible to fill in gaps of the line, or do you want a last ditch attempt at bring up reserves while the enemy is weakening?
You can retreat under attack, to do that you simply select the unit under fire and do a move command to another providence (yours or your enemies) that is not held by an enemy unit. Be careful however when retreating to an enemy providence, you risk the chance of the unit being cut off and eliminated from the game.

Also if you retreat you will lose the ability to control that unit until they are safety in a providence not under attack, as well as cut off units that have no providence to go to will be removed from the game and considered POW's.

Your reinforcements will gradually increase your strength over time to full capacity, but will be affected by attrition that your unit recieve's in occupied Providences ( attrition resembles loses of men to the weather, partisans and other non direct combat casualties).

The production sliders will always be a problem for you and one you will have to juggle continuously. You need to chose what is most important to you at the time, upgrades of new units (? Reinforcements of new men for the front? New whole Divisions or brigade attachments for such divisions? Supplies are extremely important and should be kept out of the red at all times, as well as consumer goods.

With the upgrades the time it takes depends on the unit that it is trying to upgrade and in some instances can take months. If you decide to produce a MK 2 tank in 1939 and it is set to finish in 1941, but in 1940 Mk 3 tanks come into play, the MK 2 tanks in production will continue to be produced and will be upgraded once they are deployed to the front? So not only do you have to pay for them while they are being produced but you have to pay for them after to be upgraded with better designs.

You can however decide not to upgrade a specific unit, which is best down with third rate units, such as garrison units and the like.

If you don't allocate enough IC's to consumer goods then your dissent in your country will continue to rise, meaning partisans will be more likely to rise up and this will also have a negative result on your units in combat and even your IC output, consider it the morale of the country.

Did you know that you can increase your IC output by both researching new technologies giving you a percentage increase to it as well as building new factories under the production tab at the top but below the three military arms buttons?

If you have an officer with a panzer bonus then we he commands a panzer unit he automatically gives the bonus in combat. This can be seen in the combat window, (I will show you in the screenshots). You only get the combined arms bonus if you have researched the level 1 combined arms doctrine outwise you get only a simple mixed unit bonus which is not as much, but can still be enough to matter.

 

Ok so in these shots I thought it would be good to start a new game as Nationalist China to attempt to mimic your game, at least on a small scale. I can immediatly see that your nation has around 40 odd IC which is why you never seem to have enough and why you can only build one division at a time, perhaps for combat experience you should start as Germany?

Anyways, the screeshot here shows my two HQ lead armies crossing Japanese lines at two points (the red lines shot who is attacking for what providence to the defending one.) The number 54 is a way the game illustrates how successful your battle is going , starting as low as 1 all the way to 100. It is broken down into three colours red, yellow and green. Red meaning you battle is going badly and you should halt immediatly or add more troops and flanking moves. Yellow means you are slowly winning but also losing the battle, and it is still yet to be decided. Green means your attack is going well and in time you will defeat the enemy in the area assuming the unit and weather hold out. You may notice that when you attack are providence the number that comes up varies, this shows you how successful the initial attack was.


In this shot you can see only a single unit is attacking with the same result as two, you can see that my units involved are x2 infantry divisions and 1x militia division(militia should never be used to do any real fighting, they simply don't have the staying power). You can see there troop numbers in each brigade and on the right of that is the orange bar (unit manpower strenght) and the green bar (organisation). The organisation has started at around 50% and will not increase until my doctrines and infantry techs do.

At the bottom of the troop id window you will see a bar both red and green, this shows which way the battle is swinging, and the power of each side, and the chance of winning, this one is clearly a 50 50 match, shown also by the 54 number on the map. By holding the mouse over the battle name it shows the units involved on both sides as well. If you click on this it brings up the battle window.


The battle window.

Here it displays both sides of the conflict. As well as any determining factors , marked by the little pictures under the picture of an open field between the two opposing flags. The current ones on this screen shot from left to right are , famous leader (giving the units a boost), Experience (giving units a boost), dug in ( giving the defenders a boost to the defence rating), River crossing ( a large penalty to the attacking force, always attempt to avoid river crossings. these penalties can be lowered with engineers being attached to the division as well as certain research techs such as bridge crossing tools also bring the penality down.

By holding the mouse over any of the units in the list it shows the ratings of that unit, the current selected one shows, that the attack rating to be 50 percent, not overly good. The river crossing penality is evident here causing -50% rating to the attacking force, but experience of the unit in combat is adding +5% back onto the attacking rating.

You will see that there is no reserves either. Reserves will randomly come into a battle, and how often they come into play into the battle depends on the level of you techs which can increase the amount of time they are involved. As the manual states, a battle can be won and lost completely without a reserve unit even being but into the battle.

You can also notice the organisation differences between the two sides. The Japanese Force having a much higher organisation level meaning that unit will be able to stay in this battle far longer then any of mine.

The width of the units indicates how long the battle line can, meaning the longer it is the more chance the unit will flank the enemy with a lower width counter. The 15 in the circle in the middle indicates how long the battle field is, so the Chinese have a better chance of flanking then the Japanese.

More ScreenShots later.