Hearts of Iron 3 : Questions

[TheBromgrev]

on a marine related issue, how many boats do I need to carry 4 divisions of 4 marine brigades ?

Five transports can carry a corps worth of almost anything, which is why I use transport groups of 6. It's always a good idea to have extra transports. That way, if you lose one you won't lose the grounds units it was carrying, as the units "shift" to empty transports in the fleet. Transports are #1 on the target list for ships and planes, meaning they will be attacked before any other ship type.

[TheBromgrev]

Who are you playing as? The US still?

Battles end when one side runs out of organization. If you ran out of supplies, then your units org will slowly fall to 0. That means when you get attacked you lose immediately.

Units can disappear in only 2 ways. The first is when they're encircled and can't retreat. This can occur when completely surrounded by enemy troops, or when trapped against the sea of an impassable province (infrastructure is too low). The second way is when they're overrun. This happens when a unit retreats, and the enemy takes the province the unit was in and the province the unit is retreating to before the unit gets there. This happens a lot with garrisons, but you can see it happen in Ukraine as well.

If you're fighting in a faction-mates or ally's territory, then your ally will be supplying your troops. The game will "magically" initiate a hidden supply trade between you and the ally to help compensate, although that won't be enough if you send too many troops over. 200k men sounds like you sent WAY too many troops to help China, which has very low infrastructure (meaning it has supply problems anyway), low IC to build supplies, has a huge army anyway, and is already supplying Guangxi's troops.

If you only have military access, then like I said earlier it's impossible to supply your troops in neutral territory, which makes military access completely useless.

From a strategic sense, why did you send troops to help China? It makes much more sense to invade Japan itself, especially since the Japanese AI really likes to send everything it has to China and leave the home islands undefended. However, 200k troops would be far too many and you'd run into supply problems. Just use a single army of 4 corps to do the job; that should be more than enough.

[matt will]

I think when your troops are out of supply they loose organisation and so they basically rout quicker and then I don't think they had enough org to retreat and so they were wiped out. And to help supply your troops, upgrade infrastructure (you need specific tech for this) and capturing ports nearby does help although the supplies still all run through one port and then go to nearer ports (and so you get a massive blockage as the port wont be able to cope with the volume of supplies). Also if you have transport planes then you can run supply drops to regions inside their range as long as their airbase is supplied. But Asia in general is a logistical nightmare with the low infrastructure and long distances.

[TheBromgrev]

He said he was in China helping out, which means he can't upgrade infrastructure or ports since he doesn't own those provinces.

[Augment]

is it even possible to form East Germany after the war?

[TheBromgrev]

Yes, but things need to be perfectly historical to do so, because Germany's surrender event sucks. The US will annex lots of German territory even if it never joined the war, for example. To get a decent German surrender you'll need to use a mod.

[Augment]

i use Iron Cross, but the D-day invasion always fails or they dont gain much ground.
especially in my Soviet Union games, i just steamroll over the germans after sometime and the allies get stuck around normandy.

[TheBromgrev]

That's because you're playing with ICE. ICE is a perfect example of the saying "too many cooks in the kitchen". They don't know how the AI works or how to influence it, so they write scripted invasions instead that peter out and die.

If you want to see the AI perform invasions on its own, without scripts, and succeed, then try the HPP mod. ICE doesn't touch the AI files, while the HPP completely rewrites them. It's like you're playing a completely different game.

OK, I'm a bit biased here since I'm one of the HPP modders, but you'll never see a good invasion in ICE unless you happen to get lucky. That's not the case for the HPP mod. As an example, I was doing a test game as the RoC, and built coastal forts on my major ports, and placed heavy garrisons in them. The Japanese AI then attempted to land in Qingdao, which was defended by 2 garrison divisions and a level 3 coastal fort. At first, it looked like I would win, but after 2 days AI Japan landed forces next to the city and attacked from 3 sides, eventually taking the port and killing my garrisons. You'll never see that in the original game or any other mod but the HPP. With the mod I've seen AI Germany get beaten by AI USSR, with the UK performing D-Day alone and liberating France, AI Germany land in Scotland and finish off the UK before doing Barbarossa, Japan island hop to Australia then lose to the US, I've seen Italy drop paratroopers on the Suez, and Germany drop paratroopers in Paris. You'll never see this type of behavior in ICE or the original game, because their AI sucks.

[Augment]

I'm willing to pick HPP, but im one off those people that like events and the many special divisions like german SS, british SAS, French foreign legion etc

[Wegen7 die Große]

Hey quick question, how do I strategically redeploy?

[TheBromgrev]

Pick the units you want to move then ctrl+right click the province you want to strategically deploy to. This won't work if you want to go through allied territory though, only provinces you own that are contiguous.

@Augment: Well, the HPP isn't for you then, since I didn't add any of that stuff. SS units? They're basically normal infantry with the "prioritize upgrades" button turned on. They were never better than normal Heer troops at all; they just got newer weapons first and happened to carry a myth about their "superiority" due to their nature. Same thing with the foreign legion. A lot of ICE units are redundant and serve no real purpose, IMO, than cluttering up the tech tooltips, make the game run slower, give the AI something else that it can't use or build properly, require activation events that often times are bugged, etc. I guess they're good if you like flavor events and units though. The HPP mod focuses on quality, while ICE focuses on "stuff". You want to play Germany and be afraid of D-Day? Play the HPP. You want to play with armored trains, assault guns that are only good in cities, units whose stats are the same as the normal ones but their counters are different, lots of flavor events that break if you go ahistorical, and an extremely bloated tech tree that only Germany and the US could hope to research then stick with ICE.

[Augment]

Im trying out HPP, only then i can form a real opinion.

thanks for taking the time, sir

[TheBromgrev]

No problem, hope you like it. And if you don't, please let me know why. I'm actually more interested in problems people find with it than praise, as the problems raised point to areas that could use improvements.

[Nyxos]

whats a good nation to start using the HPP mod with ? I have it installed but it brings so much I'm kinda lost :/
Also, does the game AI know what to do ? I always like having the AI doing the most of the work when I first play a game (I'm counting the HPP mod as a complete new game ) so I can learn from its mistakes

[TheBromgrev]

I would pick either the UK, Germany, Italy, or US to start with. China's a much nastier beast than before, and you'll have a hard time as Japan if you do your normal strategies. Likewise, the RoC is difficult because the Japanese AI actually performs competent invasions in multiple ports simultaneously. Depending on the version you downloaded, Japan will also actually fight the USSR during the Battle of Khalkin Gol and the Changkufeng Lake Incident. These battles are normal events in other mods and the original game, but are actual wars in the HPP that stop after a large battle. The USSR is much more difficult to play than it should be, but not impossible, and we're actually tackling how to fix that problem in the official HPP forum right now. In pre-1.9.18 versions of the HPP France is good for a fun game, but the OOBs in the latest version really beef France up. Unfortunately the new map gave France a big leadership hit which brings it on-par with Italy, which I'm trying to address as part of an overall leadership balancing effort. An interesting option is to play as the Netherlands or Norway, which have received a lot of attention from fans of the mod who wanted to help by modding those specific countries.

Yes, the AI knows what to do. We've modded every aspect of the AI we could get our hands on, which is everything except the hardcoded military portion. That means we can't tell the AI when to perform invasions, how to organize its troops, or how to garrison its ports. However, we can influence how it does those things, which is why the military AI seems to be smarter. The reason for the higher frequency of well-done invasions is because we gave the AI a port supply bonus, which makes it more likely to invade in the first place, and helps the invasions succeed. The reason the UK and Japanese AIs actually garrison their home islands is because we told them to make more garrison troops. Things of that nature have been done to influence the military AI to do what we want, but we're still limited to what we can do since the military AI is hardcoded.

[Wegen7 die Große]

Hey how do I take a screen shot of the world?

[Nyxos]

F12 I believe.

[Wegen7 die Große]

Aright and after I do that were would the pics be?

[Nyxos]

Aright and after I do that were would the pics be?

I have no idea

[TheBromgrev]

Aright and after I do that were would the pics be?

In the game folder named Screenshots. You use F11 to take screenshots and F12 to get a world map picture.