Hearts of Iron III lets you play through the most engaging conflict in world history, World War 2, on all fronts, as any country and through multiple different scenarios. Guide your nation to glory and wage war, conduct diplomacy and build your industry between 1936 and 1948.

Hearts of Iron 3 Development Diary #4 – Leadership

Hello, and welcome back to the weekly HoI3 development diary.

It has been another week of interesting development at the project, and we continued with development of the core of politics, diplomacy and logistics. The interface is starting to come together, and we hope to soon be able to show you some of them.

Rather evilly we left you with a bit of cliff-hanger last week, the answer to the question how do you do research? This week 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.

In later developer diaries you will hear more about diplomacy and espionage and how we plan to achieve our goal of making you plan your investment in these areas for the long term. At the moment we will say that the amount of leadership points invested in these areas acts as a cap on how much you can do. The focus of this dev diary will be party on technology and partly on officers.

As mentioned at the top of diary leadership is your educated people. 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.

I mentioned earlier that I would explain what the little flag at the top of the screen is for. Well, as you now most likely have guessed, its the indicator of your leadership.