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 #8– Unit Hierarchy

Hello, and welcome to the eight chapter of the HoI3 developer diary. This last week has been as busy as usual, with plenty of progress on naval combat, map design, orders & espionage.

Well last week we talked a bit about the division design system and promised you a bit more about land units. First off I suppose we start with the basic philosophy. We felt that the Heart of Iron 2 Division as a concept worked and worked well. So the division as an operation unit has not gone under any radical changes. Instead we have sought to improve the environment in which the division operates-

In previous developer diaries we talked about the additional provinces we added to make the combat more fluid, the frontage system to make combat more than the biggest stack and the division design system to make divisions more unique. So what else could we add to divisions?

However to add some much needed suspense and drama to this developer diary first we must diverge. As promised we will first give you a quick run through of what the symbols were in the previous developer diary. Although before we do that a quick health warning, these are alpha screen shots the numbers you see are purely place holders. So don’t try to read too much into them.

So running from left to right you see of course Strength and Organisation. The next one is a new concept of combat width. Then we have the three attack values; soft, hard and air attack. Then the three defensive values; when you are on the defence, on the attack and air defence. The next one is unsurprisingly the speed of the unit. Then we have suppression value. The next two are supply and fuel consumption. Then we have IC cost, manpower cost and time.

Most of these concepts are very familiar to those of you who played the previous incarnations of Hearts of Iron so you are probably wondering what we did add? As we mentioned in the presentation in Leipzig, we have added a command structure. Divisions now fit into a multilevel command structure. From Theatre, Army Group, Army, Corps through to Division. Each level has its own commander that gives its own bonus according to his skill level. At division level you get a bonus to combat while a corps commander increases the chances of reserves joining combat. Our goal is to leave you wanting good commanders at each level thus leaving you to think about should you promote that Major General to a Lieutenant General and give him command of a corps? At every position in the command structure, you can insert a leader of the designated rank.

Another important aspect of this is the fact that every division is its own unit on the map, and so is every HQ above it. Now you may think that this will increase micromanagement? Well, we have some pretty interesting plans on how to handle unit orders.

Well, having almost finished with land units, one thing left is what are we doing about supply. Maybe that should be next week’s dev diary?

To end this weeks development diary, we’re going with a few screenshot of South America, where so many of the major battles of WW2 was.