HOI 3 Gameplay Help

I'm still in the process of learning about the game. I am reading the strategy guide from the Paradox forum. This guide (so far) talks a lot about theoreticals and not much in specifics. Getting prepared for war appears to be every bit as much of a battle as actually being at war. Ignoring phases of buildup can have disasterous consequences down the road. I read one of the posts in this thread which points this out well.

Just reading this I want to put Diplomacy on autopilot as the Paradox guide suggests.

By setting the Diplomacy Interface to automatic, for instance, it will set up trades for you according to your needs, and save you the trouble of having to worry about it. The interfaces you will most likely want to retain control of are Production and Technology, because that’s where you make choices about what technologies and military units you want to have to fight your war.​

There are many other phases that could also be put on autopilot. I am considering taking the route of just controlling Production and Technology so I can concentrate fully on those aspects. Even Paradox's quick start guide seems to at least start out pretty involved. On the other hand if I found a good country specific guide I might start out that way.

I've opened the game screen for the US in 1936 and Italy in 1936. There is a world of difference in their starting positions militarily and I'm assuming other regards as well. Italy already is commited to war in Ethiopia and they have many divisions between them and France as well as Yugoslavia. The US appears pretty devoid of troops. Unless I read things incorrectly (perhaps this is somewhat random) Italy is more aligned with the Allies in the beginning and the US is more aligned with the Axis perhaps this is historically true in 1936 but I still find it interesting.

Prior to talking with Mussolini I had come to the somewhat conscious decision to try my 1st game as the US. It appears he is going that route for the same reason as me; this allows a time cushion to get familiar with the game before the demands of war hit fully.

I still haven't completed my reading. I hope to get underway before the New Year.

 

The game is historical to the date as long as you completely follow the timeline historically, for example if you wage war on Austria in 1936 you can't annex them using the event so other events linked to that won't happen. You literally have the ability to redo ww2 as you see fit, this will also affect the way other countries see you.

In one game as Germany, I was able to keep the US out of the indefinitely, in another they declared war as soon as I annexed Austria, so it is dependent on your decisions in the game.

I believe the game itself actually recommends putting the Diplomacy and the trade on AI control and leaving the rest up to you.

Did you know you put the entire game on AI control?
This includes all of the top tabs as you pointed out, but also troop assignment and even letting the computer take over your military on the map, just give them objectives and assign the troops that they can have, and they will look after the attack.

The US at the beginning of ww2 were in no way considered the 1st rate military they were by the end of ww2. They still had equipment from ww1 including tanks, so it is accurate.

 

I'm 2 or 3 months into the game and a few questions have popped up that hopefully someone can make sense out of.
1) Red supply curve: I'm assuming this means I am out of supply? There is one green curve and one red curve taking slightly different routes going from San Diego to Honolulu. Is this a problem and if so how would I fix this?
2) Mussolini said something about building a base on the Phillipines. I have a few units on the main island but it is under Phillipine control. Is it possible to build anything on the island?
3) I am trying to build a simple militia unit; I can place this in a cue but can't build it, any idea why not?
4) Is my AI controlled Diplomacy ruining my country or is there another problem? I just noticed I have a small fuel deficit. It appears I have a good supply of crude. When I looked in the trade tab I see that I am trading with almost 20 countries. 2/3 of these countries are either getting crude oil or energy in trade for money. Would this be very wise to trade away resources for money? Is this why I am starting to get a fuel deficit?

Every time I figure one thing out another issue pops up. This is a very complicated game.

 

Ok, your supply is based on available supplies and your IC. If you do not have enough IC producing supplies for all your troops then you hit the problem of lack of supply. It could be due to something interfering with your supply line, such as partisans, being that it is also a supply line across the ocean you also need to allocate a convoy with a supply drop off at Honolulu, this you can do in the production tab down the bottom right. It will show you all your current convoy's available and whether they are transporting enough goods.

You should be able to as lonf as you control the providence regardless of who owns it, if however they are your allies, it is considered there land and you simply have stationed men there and it is up to them to look after there island defences. You can't actually build bases of any kind, only fortifications, airbases and coastal Defences. (this includes bunkers and trenchs and so on.) You can do this by either clicking on the Providence and selecting the option for fortification\Coastal\Airfield, or I believe there is an option in the production tab to build them and then you can simply allocate it there, that you will have to check out though. Either way the building or fortifications takes up IC which you can view in your Production tab.

You may have to adjust your production slider on the right of the production tab. It will tell you what you need compared to what you allocated to production. If in the cue the militia unit bar looks red then it has not enough allocated IC, if yellow it has around 50% if green it is at full production.

It could also be due to not enough resources such as money, manpower, or Iron. etc. Seeing as you have just started the game it won't be manpower, but you say below you are facing problems with your resources, so that will most probably be the reason why they arn't producing anything. If you hold the mouse curser over each resource at the top of any page of the game, it will tell you exactly where your resources are coming from as well as where they are going.

I have found that if you don't watch the AI in terms of Diplomacy he may just run your economy into the ground. Mine constantly trades my money away for everything I don't need, so sometimes you need to manually take him off AI and take care of it yourself.
You make money by making consumer goods, which can be done in the production tab using the sliders on the right, or you can trade your resources away both work fine but trading works better other wise you can lose a lot of IC in consumer goods. I also prefer to produce more supplies and trade those doe what I need.

Like I said to you before, it is easy once you get the hang of it.

If you have any issues or problems just ask and will help you out.

 

If you want a better understanding of the game and how it all works I suggest actually reading the HOI II manual. It may not be fully up to date with some of the newer changes to HOI III, but I have read both and the second one goes more in depth on how the game fully works.

Also, a tip with your research.
Don't just click anything and everything, have a plan what you want to focus on and go after it. There is no point researching something you don't plan to use, such as for example battlecrusiers.

You also have to take into account the select skills your reserachers have, the Germans are good at spearhead tactics, so they research those technologies faster than any other but faulter when it comes to aircraft carriers. As the US you will be great when it comes to the navy and since the pacific is the main target here as well as marines and close support aircraft.

You may have noticed, but there is a tab in the technolgy page which says theory. This button may appear to do nothing, however by researching these you can increase the research of your main technolgies. At the bottom of that screen it shows you in terms of numbers exactly how advanced you are in certain fields, these are your strengths. For example. I am play Germany at the moment and my infantry skill theory and practicability is 22 while my strategic bombers is only 1 so I lack in that area and my research will take forever.

If also may have noticed the information buttons which pop up in the top left hand of the screen, these tell you everything important which is going on. This will tell you when you are getting low on a particular resource as well any problems with your production and technologies.

 

Thank you so much for your help.

I have done my best to search the manual for answers and google search but many times answers are difficult to find.

I'll go back to my 4 earlier questions and I also am running into more things that I am not too familiar with.

1) Red Curve identification: As much as I know I don't believe I am out of supply. Yes there is a route from San Diego to Honolulu in the lower right of the production screen, and it is green. I don't see any other shortages to attribute this to. In reading the manual it does suggest red routes are return routes but 1) I don't see this on my other routes and 2) I don't see the other leg of the trade route which is supposed to be blue. Confusing.

2) Phillipines base building: In what you are saying there is a decent chance that I have enacted the correct steps to get a base in the Phillipines. Thinking what you described I put an airbase in the production cue; hoping that I could place it in the Phillipines once it is ready.

3) Militia I can't build: Once again I don't believe this is because of shortages. The tab which I found the militia unit to build was under Production/Brigade Attachment. I'm thinking that either there is something else I'm not seeing with Brigade Attachment or I just can't build manpower related units due to pre-war conscription laws. It is obvious that I can build other units such as ships, but perhaps I just can't conscript the labor force.

4)Quacky Diplomacy AI: Thankfully the computer AI has sorted out the fuel shortage. Still I do not like how it is running things. It seems to work opposed to what I want. It wants to align with Germany. It has 3 ongoing trades (2 including crude) and my diplomacy triangle is sitting very close with the Axis. On the other hand it is refusing every trade offer that the UK has given. From my side I have 10 spys in Germany looking over their military shoulder. The threat index under Intelligence shows Germany as the only threat of over 0 (0.1). Under Politics I OK'd the lawmakers to put together legistlation to oust a Fascist member of my government.

With what I know I can continue on.

Other interesting things have been occuring.

1) I've put some money towards improving the islands in the Pacific. Looking over at Wake Island I see that a couple items in my infrastucture have been damage. Tabbing over this I am somewhat reassured that the damage will be fixed but my big question is how did it get damaged in the 1st place??? I am suspecting the Japanese, but I am not at war with them so I have no clue how they could have pulled this off. Yes, I do know that sneaky piracy could happen on the sea but I wouldn't have expected this on land. For now my counter measure will be to station a few ships at Wake.

2) I have absolutely no leadership or leadership available in my air wings. As far as the ground troops are concerned I assigned leaders (taking pains to get top commanders with organizational bonuses) to every unit without a leader. The airborne leadership appears to be a completely different animal, I have no clue how to develope leadership. In Technology I presently am studying Fighter Training hoping that it might encourage leadership.

3) Moving back to the Phillipines; Something happened that has me a little concerned but I don't know what happened. I transported all my Guam based units to the Phillipines including 2 very high ranked units. (One has 5 x's, the other has 6 x's). I re-structured the 3 existing units on Phillipines to the Guam HQ leadership. Shortly afterwards a big yellow message which I couldn't read flashed on the screen. When I looked at my units I saw that a high ranked Phillipines HQ was on top of my units. I was unable to click on the stack. I only saw my 5 x HQ the 6 x was missing. Clicking on the 5 x all my other Phillipine units flashed, but to my knowlege I still couldn't do anything with my large stack. A little while later I scrolled back to the US and wouldn't you know the 6 x was standing somewhere in the middle of nowhere like he was airlifted by extra terrestrials. This unit no longer was run by the leader I selected and the organization designation showed him as a completely new HQ called Theater 2. This all was very confusing.

4) Great generals are starting to show up as leading quite small HQ's. McCarther is a 3 x under the New York HQ. I'm wondering whether I should (and if allowed) transfer my units to their worthy stations.

A lot of questions are popping up. I appreciate the help I've received.

I am wondering whether another thread thread should be started to focus on the gameplay of HOI3 itself so this thread could focus more on what people like and don't like about the game?

 

Today I've been playing the game, reading the strategy, playing the game, doing google searches, going back to the game. What I have discovered is that I believe I am completely inefficient both in my technology choices and in the way I've done production.

What I am grasping is that I could be getting much better production and research if with every field that I am working on would produce a unit. (That way my research times would be aided greatly from the "practical" bonus's.) Correct me if I'm wrong but to get the practical bonus for a given field I would only have to build a representative unit. In other words if I want the artillery bonus I produce an artillery unit. If I want a naval bonus I build a naval unit. If I want a construction bonus I build a building.

Additionally I discovered the little thing that you alluded to above above about not wasting your research quotas. Know the type of fighting you plan on seeing. See what the ultimate unit or doctrine you want to achieve is. Use the tooltip on this icon to see the research path necessary to achieve the goal. This revealed a huge difference of research goals.

I will make a few comments on the questions I asked above.

-When you build an infantry unit can this be done one at a time or do you have to fill an entire division out?
-Wake Island was mine from the beginning and was not damaged. I'm not clear whether espionage, military or a typhoon caused the damage. If the base is not occupyed is it possible for an enemy to vandalise it because they know I can't see what happened?
-For the air wing leadership I was referring to an actual commander of the wing. I had no trouble with finding leaders for my Army or Navy, perhaps the Airforce is just behind the times, and eventually I would be able to pick a leader out. That is a good point that another path might be the air wing might get a field promotion for practical experience.

Based off my mistakes I will most likely keep my last save game for an experience template but will most likely start over the game, with everything I've learned in mind.

I also need to do some more reading on HQ structure as I've read some conflicting information as to what the ideal structure actually is.

 

Do I have to read all that or is thier some kind of training video?This game make my head hurt.........…

 

Only if you want to win.

 

Tomcat: I really like Empire Total War as well. About a month ago I played the entire 100 year game in one week. Well not that many years; I hit the victory condition around 1770.

panzer kampf gruppen 6: I definately can relate as to how steep a learning curve there is. I personally am surprised that there are not several build order tutorials out there. Pretty much every RTS game I've played has people who have submitted good build orders to help beginners. I guess every gaming community for a specific game is different. Thanks to people helping out things are starting to click with this game.

 

Would you like some screen shots with whats what?

 

That could be quite helpful. I'm slow but sure understanding things but even if I understand some of the screen shots it could be of great assistance to someone who just got the game.

Actually the last couple of days I have tried to link pictures with my post and my uploaded image always shows the entire WW2 forum website. I have 2 screen shots. One shows the red curve that I am seeing in the supply interface and the other shows a picture of my military hiearchy (from the statistics tab) of which it appears I don't yet know how to link my HQ structure yet.

 

Does your game take forever to load to the main menu once you click the icon on the desktop?

 

Just found this maybe this will help you better under stand the HQ system.

Command structure - HoI3Wiki

 

France keep attacking me early how do I stop it?they are not suppose to blaze the border.

 

You need to be quite specific on your problem with this game. If you are Germany then get more divisions.

 

You can see in this one clearly all the supply lines for this nation. Green meaning fully supplied. and red meaning lack of supplies. Or in this particular case the red sea land supply routes mean that the sea routes exist and are fine, however there is just no resources in those ports to be moved.
Ok here are some screenshots

As you can see on the windowed box on the right, it lists all of teh HQ's in order from the currently selected Division, (in this case the 88th infantry Divsions) and then it lists all the following HQ's above this unit. The little green "HQ" button means that the unit is in HQ radio range and therefore recieves all the traits from the HQ. You will also notice in the pop up box in the middle it lists the location of all the other HQ's connected to this unit and the green numbers mean each unit is in radio range of the next.






This one shows the objectives set for this Army Group North France, the bright white names being the objectives for this army to hold. These objectives are then filtered down through the HQ system and the Divisions allocated to this army will begin to move to these areas and defend, this option can also be used in the attack role by simply changing the drop down box in the pop up window.

 

The production tab.

This one clearly shows the units currently in production, green being at full speed and the slightly orange one at the noted speed. This is due to lack of IC which can be seen on the right on the slider bar - production. The bottom right also shows the supply routes red being the ones i mentioned earlier. In this game red means bad, insufficient, lack of and so on., green being good.

This tab also shows you what the computer feels that you need in certain theaters in mine it says I don't need anything.



By holding the mouse over the division name in the production line it shows what briagdes are being assigned and trained for that division.



IN this tab in the production window tab, it shows all the units you can currently produce. The box on the middle right is the current division with the currently allocated brigades to be assigned. You can whose any makup that you please whether it be full arty divions or perhaps a full armoured division with no infantry. The best makeup is of course a mixed one such as 3x inf 1x arty.
On the right it also shows you everthing needed for this unit to be produced, including time and resources, as well as the combat abilities of the selected unit.