HOI 3 Gameplay Help

I suppose the super stack problem is off set a bit by the fact that stacking penalties have a fairly large effect on combat. IMO its way too large but w/e.

 

I was debating whether to post this in the Gameplay help thread or the Semper Fi thread; since this deals with gameplay more than the Semper Fi aspect of the game I will post here.

I've been playing HOI3 as Australia. This is actually my 2nd time through; I should probably call it quits because it is in 1946 but this time around I got to see a lot more combat as I helped out in North Africa.

I did one thing considerably different this time through. I started building factories as soon as I researched Construction Engineering. My thought was that this would broaden my IC base which is lacking for Australia. However I couldn't observe the correlation between building factories and IC. Is this wishful thinking on my part or are they tied together? I watched the IC like a hawk but it didn't appear to increase with the built factory. I did notice however that with each factory increase as it was researched it would show up brown and with the cursor over this it would say it is damaged. This would show up as fixed in time. If IC and factory developement are related can you observe this value for each region? If this ties together would you produce more specific resources if you build this in a region that has a specific resource. In other words if I have a region that has Energy and Rare Materials, if I expanded my factory in that region would it increase my Energy and Rare Materials?

Just some observations to add.

As I continued through the game I discovered that I could rebase both my transport fleet and planes all the way from Australia to North Africa. This almost seems un-realistic as in real life I would think they would need to resupply at different points in the voyage.

When I got into actual combat it appears that the troops do very poorly if the Officer percentage was low. I would take full stacks against a single defending unit and still lose the battle. My officer percentage was under 60, but towards the end I pulled it above 100. There seemed to be much of an improvement in combat.

I do have something in the game which literally drives me bonkers. As I get well into the game I find that "NO ONE" wants to trade with me. When I started losing Energy I tried trading with any country that would trade with me. I would get refused every single time even if the other country had a massive stockpile of Energy but didn't have any money. This also happened with countries that I had good trading relations with. Anyone know how to not have this issue?

I found out that it helped a lot to click the Allign to Allies button early in the game. This seems to trigger the nuetrality reduction. My 1st game it took me until late 1944 before I was at war.

I do find it helps to play as a smaller country in this game to better understand some of the correlations in the game.

The game is a lot of fun but I find that I wish some of the effects of doing things were better explained in the game.

 

Once you're allied to some one, people are less likely to trade with you since you aren't so neutral. By the time war breaks out thugh you should be pretty set with trades. Supply is always an issue in combat, and 'rebasing' range is based on the need not to return to original port of call - if you can carry 1000KM of fuel, your range is only going to be 500KM - out and back = 1000KM - so theoretically you can rebase to a port that is double your 'range' away.

 

Hey Matt,

I do think you are correct about trade difficulties being tied to lower neutrality. I even recall the game where we played as 2 Chinas that I ran into trouble with not enough Energy, and no faction wanted to trade with me. It isn't easy to predict needs but perhaps as you suggest you need to set up a good trade balance prior to lowering neutrality.

As far as the transport range is concerned perhaps the rebasing was the critical concept that alluded me at 1st; as this allows the doubling of range. My home port is 600 KM away which would fall well into the 1000 KM range.

I found documentation which somewhat explains IC developement. What I read is that IC is connected with factories which are built. I will have to go back and count all the factory production levels to see if they all add up. If this is the case I am wondering if Industry Production upgrades automatically add a level at a random plant or if there just is a constantly fluctuating percentage modifier which just adds on the extra IC to all the production plants.

I also read that in order for you to appreciate the IC gains you might get that you have to have units of Energy, Rare Materials and Metals to cover each IC. If you don't; then all the IC will not be counted. What this tells me (correct me if I'm wrong) is that it does not make any difference where you might grow your factories, it doesn't need to be tied to any resource region.

The bottom line that I'm seeing at this point is that if you have a time cushion prior to combat that it is a great advantage to use this cushion to open up the IC bottleneck by building as many factories as possible. To take full advantage of the time you would want to be producing something however prior to getting the Construction Engineering technology.

 

When you produce industry in the production tab, consider it to be more the preparation of getting the materials and people together to actually build the factories then the factories actually being built.

Now when you place a factory, you are not placing the finished product therefore, you do not get the increase of IC immediately, but instead if you watch the counter over a few months while the factory is 'built' you will eventually see it change by a certain percentage and therefore an increase in IC output, this is why it looks 'damaged'. That colour that represents damaged, consider it to be more 'made to be used' whether it is building for the first time or repairing something from damage.

Things like ministers, and greater technologies, and even certain trading with countries can also increase your IC output.

Yes, it does not matter where you place the factories, just like you said, every IC requires a certain amount of resources, depending on where the IC's a allocated depends on which resources they need, for example your production queue requires more rare materials than the others.

For some reason the game seems to negate fuel or range of a vessel or plane when rebasing, I remember it used to happen in HOI 2 but was taken out in HOI 3.

This is realistic, without a constant and competent supply of officers your men will be badly lead, therefore bad decisions will be made on the field of battle, which shows as a lack of combat ability, so the higher your number of officers the better, with of course reason, a good amount is to simply keep it at 110% this leaves all your units fully supplied with officers and some left over.

 

Oh, something I have just recently discovered about the sea supply lines. There are two colours red and green, green means in supply and traditionally in HOI red meant out of supply, however in HOI 3, they have changed that, to where red can either mean out of supply, or it is simply an in bound convoy and green represents an outbound convoy, you figure it out you need to check your production screen or simply hold the mouse over the respected arrow for information.

 

I think this means we all need to get on and play HOI 3 at the same time and trade with each other!

 

As I am getting more aquainted with this game I see one thing which perplexes me a bit.

Without applying a neutrality cheat how would you quickly go to war with a neighboring country?

This is what I have done
1) My 10 internal spies are set to lowering neutrality.
2) 10 more spies are in the neighboring country increasing this country's threat level

I want to ally to the Axis but even though I'm drifting this way the "allign to faction" button is greyed out, and the "join faction" option is not even there. I only mention this as I think by joining a faction it would help bring the neutrality down.

It is 1938 and when I cursor over the greyed out "war" button I see my neutrality is around 55, and the other category to allow war is moved up to about 25. These numbers are moving closer together but it's taking quite a long time.

 

The only way is to edit the same game file - either edit your neutrality, the X,Y number of your country (on the axis/allies/comm triangle), or by adding your name to the AXIS list (which would put you on the Axis side). It also depends on what country you are - certain events that occur will lower your neutrality or increase your neighbors threat levels.

 

So it appears I've done all that I can to work towards the point of war without changing things outside of the game.

I guess I've done the best balancing act then. I could have poured all my Leadership into Intelligence but that would have sacrificed my ability to develope essential technology's. That would be the only way I could lower the resistance to war quicker.

 

Have you done the "Align to Faction" via Diplomacy Screen?

 

It took me a little while but I did. I didn't realize I couldn't allign while Germany was influencing me.

After being accepted into the Axis things have gone quickly. I've taken over Bulgaria and Hungary. I'm trying to decide whether to attack Greece or Yugoslavia next. The very fact that I just took out Hungary lines my troops up for an attack on Yugoslavia. Greece however looks easier to take out.

 

As Italy, I attack Greece through Yugoslavia. They have a lot of land fortifications in the mountains, so I focus my attack on a certain province. Moving deeper into Greece from that province moves you into plains areas, not mountains, so I make a beeline down the coast with Cav/Tanks to grab Athens, while an infantry forces takes Sallonica...the only two VPs in Greece. I avoid fighting the majority of the Greek Army this way, and the Mtns. Slow them down trying to get to Athens themselves.

 

I have a couple questions which I have often wondered but haven't learned the answer.

If within a division I have a Motorized Infantry Brigade, an Engineer, and Light Armor would the speed of the unit be as fast as the slowest unit which would be the Engineer, or would the Engineer get carried by the Motorized Infantry making the Light Armor be the slowest and the speed of the division?

Another question I am going to run into very soon. How do you determine which side of a river your units are located. I would like to have the enemy penalized for attacking me accross the river but I don't know which squares my units should reside.

I will attach a picture of my example.

If my troops were on Comrat and Vaslui would the enemy get a penalty for attacking me or would my troops be pinned on the enemy side of the river?

 

Units are as fast as the slowest unit they are grouped with, so the Engineer would be the slowest unit in that group (and not carried by motorized divisions).

Ironically, in my USSR AAR, I am positioning my troops on the other side of that river. The way I do it, is click on the province you think is on the other side of the river. So look at Comrat (in your picture) for example. It will show either River Crossings or Open Terrain connections to the surrounding provinces...like Vaslui. If all the enemy territories are 'River Crossing' movements away from Comrat, then they have to attack across the River. If enemy territories are not river crossings away (based on territory screen) then its not a river crossing.

 

Well, I played it through and Romania got it's butt kicked miserably. I was hoping that by spreading my forces behind the rivers which reach accross my complete country would delay the collapse of my country and hopefully give me enough time to get some great military upgrades. With what I had to turn back the Russian hordes I can see no way of preventing an easy collapse. I just don't have the size of army, and Romania was starving already with manpower.

If I had this to do over again I would have built forts to help me hold my position behind the rivers. I learned from my Greek invasion that these forts help greatly. I also could have put more effort behind removing my manpower bottleneck. Before Barbarosa I had mega IC but 0 manpower. I could have gone more levels in Agriculture. I put a lot of IC towards Italian licensed Multirole planes, even though this may be somewhat manpower efficient I did not see a telling effect on the battlefield.

Romania was a humbling learning experience. From appearances I was as strong as Italy but in reality I never would be able to withstand any major power.

I haven't heard anyone else here complain about this but the one thing that was infuriating to me was the myriad of pop-ups which demanded attention as I was losing battles and territory quicker than you could count. It was a click fest that prevented me from even being able to pay attention to what was happening on the battlefield. As I am writing this it dawns on me that a lot of this would be due to the fact that my game was running at 3 clicks in speed.

 

Thanks Matt,

I never knew there was information to help discern river crossing penalties. Ironically the Comrat square shows river crossing penalties to all regions surrounding it, yet the region which my armor is stationed does not consider Comrat as a river crossing penalty. What this says to me is that anyone attacking me from Comrat would incur a penalty but if I was to attack Comrat I would have no penalty. Am I reading this right?

I was really hoping that brigade attachments could pick up the transport capability within the division. In other games units such as engineers could be transported. I know that the brigade size is larger than the small unit size in other games, but it's too bad the transporting stretch couldn't be made some how.

 

Thats right about the rivers.

With your regiment's you need to think of a motorized and an engineer regiment as two separate units within the division, although they do fight together in the same area, say a providence with a small city, a hill and a river. The troop units will be split up so the engineer regiment may be responsible for the city and the river, while the motorized units target may be the hill so they actually move into combat and fit as there own regiments, so if the engineers were to hitch a ride with the motorised unit, then they would be in a different part of the providence.


You also have to think that within the motorised unit, this unit will carry everything this unit requires for battle within those trucks already, such as all their infantry, heavy support weapons, even ammunition, rations and even a regiment field hospitals, so they would only have enough transport for themselves let along an entire another division.

I do however believe that you should be able to motorise any unit with in the game, such as motorised engineers or paratroopers, or at least be able to build trucks/transport units and assign them to different units to increase their overall speed, much like you do with attachments or airborne troops to aircraft. In the HOI II your overall speed of your speed was represented by your overall transport capacity which included barges, trains and trucks, if you exceeded this number which did go up with every factory you built, your forces that lacked would slow to a crawl, but even then the standard infantry were still walking into battle.

Same as why, can't you fly in an infantry division using airfields, or why can't you land HQ's with your airborne units, instead of creating them on the ground?

 

Thats why if you want a fast response reserve or a fast hitting armoured division, you should only attach mobile regiments or batteries, such as armour, motorized/mechanized infantry, SP guns, motorized artillery, or at the very least Calvary units. Otherwise all the speed bonus you may have gotten would be lost with the infantry dragging their feet slowing the advance, much like the British tanks during Operation Market Garden where the tanks had to wait for the infantry to catch up before advancing.

 

I've taken on a new yet familiar challenge with Semper Fi and Ice.

The pattern that I've seen with HOI3 is that every nation poses unique challenges. A strategy that might be helpful with one country is no use to another country.

The Nationalist China scenario is completely different with Ice. With Ice you end up almost immediately at war with Communist China. The challenge here is that Nationalist China is a very backwards country. I've tried the beginning tweaking the way I start, but what I end up with is a drawn out stalemate which lasts until I'm at war with Japan. In what I see it is virtually impossible to put enough focus on Communist China and still be ready for Japan. The script in the game does allow for breaking off the war with Communist China, but the original territory lines get set to the original.

Nationalist China has an army of many Garrisons and Militia and the regular infantry typically only has 2 brigades to a division. It seems that it requires a stack of 10 infantry in order to have a decent chance in a battle. Stacking penalties and all it seems that it requires a huge force to take out a couple Communist China units. This is somewhat a result of defensive setup but also the Communist China troops appear to be much better.

To prepare for this is very perplexing. There is no time to build up a suitable army. I have reorganized my troop heiarchy. My best early approach is to delay expansion by my enemy. I take advantage of a fort and rivers to setup behind.

There is help given which to some degree is a hinderance. Germany gives me some troops for me to use. This sometimes has to go through the typical IC distribution and build time, other times it appears the troops are for free. Where this actually hinders me is where I use a lot of IC to build Junker bombers. This is a hinderance because I don't set up with an airport within range of territories inside Communist China. This requires I waste more IC and time to build a forward airport.

I'm still deadlocked by the tim of the Marco Polo bridge incident which initiates the war with Japan.

I have not hit the right balance yet. Has anyone had any luck playing Nationalist China on Ice?