Looking Back

Hi everyone, today I thought we should do something different and take a look at how some concepts have changed over the Hearts of Iron game series. We'll be looking at supply, upgrades and reinforcement and such first. Hearts of Iron 1 I didn't remember how it was here, and actually had to go buy myself a copy of the game online because I couldn't find any discs :D HOI1 has a pretty simple supply "system", a percentage of your total Industrial Capacity (IC) is diverted to supply production via a slider and goes into your supply stockpile. Units consume supply and if they run out they start losing organization etc. For a unit to be able to draw supply it needs to be able to trace a path to a friendly port or its capital. There was also a combat modifier penalizing you from fighting far away from your capital.

Reinforcing had to be done manually (although you could do it for whole armies) by clicking on their strength to bring it back up.

Upgrading divisions was a bit tricky compared to later games. You had to take them off map into the Force Pool, perform the upgrade by partially rebuilding it and then redeploy the unit on the map. These systems gave great control, but forced you to do a ton of micromanagement and keep track of a lot of things at the same time. Hearts of Iron II Supply works a lot like HOI1, but introduces concepts like Supply Efficiency and Transport Capacity (TC). TC is a global value that gets automatically set as 150% of IC (could change by modifiers). Each division adds up to your total need of transport capacity depending on their supply consumption and if you go over it you start getting penalties. What directly effect a division is called Supply Efficiency which is an average of TC, local infrastructure and any bonuses from local HQ. Supply for divisions was now changed to be less micro intensive. You could prioritize armies and also give them special Offensive Supply when in a pinch. Doing so gave these units improved supply efficiency for a month at huge cost, but was good for your elites and critical offensives.

Upgrading and reinforcement is now also less micro and done by diverting a percentage of your IC to it with a slider. You also had the option of producing attachments (like military police or anti air) to your divisions which could be deployed later. This basic system made for a lot less micro management, while only giving up some control (there is only really 2 prio levels since a division is prioritized or not), managing attachments was some micro, but it was a step in the right direction and gave great control. One of the major downsides of the system was that there was no real way of controlling Transport Capacity, so if you expand into in asia your front in europe will get same penalty when going over a global TC, but as an abstraction it worked pretty well. Hearts of Iron III For HOI3 we wanted to expand on the supply system and make it more realistic. Supply and fuel are transported around the world in a province-by-province (and through naval transports) flow network.

This system meant that there was a realistic delay built in when stuff changed and bottlenecks appeared and it's probably our most realistic system to date. The downside of