Présentation de Hearts of Iron 3 : Their Finest Hour

Nouvel AAR mettant en avant les améliorations portées sur l'espionnage (traduction en cours) :

Spoiler:

Hi guys,

One of the more neglected aspects of the older versions of Hearts of Iron 3 was the espionage part of the game. A lot of actions there weren't really worth the leadership invested, some were exploits, and there were some issues with how the gathered data was presented to the player. A lot of people weren't happy with that screen, and quite a few outright ignored it outside of the most basic defensive actions.

Their Finest Hour seeks to address those issues. The screen was cleaned up and reorganised. Some actions were removed, some were better integrated into the interface. The data is shown in a more clear way, and the interface and the AI changes mean players will want to visit this section more often than they used to in the past.

To help me showcase the feature, it's probably the easiest to start with the poster boy of the game, Germany. I consider the 1940 scenario ("Attack on the West") to be the most presentable in this context as the Axis are assembled, enemies are clearly defined and graded at that point and leadership is fairly plentiful. So let's boot Germans in 1940 and see how the Abwehr can be of service.

The first thing that's going to shock you when you enter the screen for the first time after getting the new add-on – the starting priorities to send spies abroad are gone now. Developers heard our pleas and now we no longer have to spend our time and mouse clicks unassigning priorities across the globe at the beginning of each game. Spies will not be sent anywhere I don't tell them to go – though no spy will get lost either, they will simply stay put at home, ready to be dispatched at a later date. The second shocker is that the old army/navy/air force tree display is gone as well – it was so uninformative that it was purged and replaced with on-the-map intel from military espionage, something I'll show you later in the article, while the space in the screen was recycled to display the current production of the target country – something I find myself looking at on a regular basis to remain informed on what my enemies but also my allies are currently up to.

Going step by step, let's deal with the domestic spies first. There's still three domestic actions to pick from – counter-espionage, raise national unity and support ruling party. Some of those are more important for some countries, some can be ignored to a degree by other countries. Germans in 1940 do not have a major issue with their political system being unstable, there also isn't a lot of trouble with unity (this might come later in the war), and even counter-espionage isn't that hard to pull off, being a closed society with state press, a high degree of repression and some seriously paranoid individuals in charge. Still, I don't want the Brits to be too successful in ruining the unity of the fatherland with their strategic warfare and naval blockade, I don't want my party to lose popularity more than it has to, and most of all I don't want enemy spies running around blowing bridges up. In the past I'd have to constantly revisit the screen and alternate between multiple actions, now I just set the priority I desire for all three tasks at once, and my domestic network will split into groups to cover all three assignments according to my wishes.

The second thing I want to set is passive espionage in more relevant countries of the world. You don't always want to do something malicious in every country your spies are in – it can get your spies killed needlessly after all. A lot of time you only want to gather some interesting data about the target. The old action called "None" is gone, with it also gone is the political espionage action. Those two are melted together – and are the default action now – if there are no priorities set, your spies will try to stay safe and only collect open source intelligence about the country, they will tell you about that country's political and industrial setting. You can view country's resource and manpower reserves, party support, ministers, and most importantly their ongoing production. So let's first deal with the guys behind the moat called the English Channel. I want to keep tabs on what they are building, see what capital ships are going to enter service and how soon. For that I don't need any spy assignments in the UK, I only need to have spies there, and I can see they are building the KGV and two carriers at the moment, along with a lot of convoys to maintain their shipping lanes (it's outside the screenshot, but it's there – one of many AI improvements in the TFH). This is precious intel and it isn't very expensive in leadership to gather it.

Now to my allies. My spies are fairly safe within allied countries so while it takes effort to create a network it doesn't take much of it to maintain it – of course, safe unless they start doing something evil there, in which case the ally will not hesitate to expel them. Being the faction leader with abundant leadership I have a responsibility to help other Axis countries out so they aren't sabotaged by enemy or even outright couped out of my faction. I want my spies to strengthen the defensive networks in Japan and Italy. And since those countries have fairly weak ruling parties, opening them to all kinds of political sabotage, I want my spies with a much lower priority to try to strengthen the ruling parties there by a small margin, fortifying them against coup attempts. I also want to set similar networks but with lower priorities and lower overall amount of spies in smaller Axis or soon-to-be Axis countries, like Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania or Finland – so they aren't as vulnerable to enemy meddling into their affairs. While we're helping their party and their counter-espionage, our spies won't be bothered much and will not need constant replacements.

Now to my most immediate enemy, the country I will be invading in a minute, France. They have fairly modern armies, and their democracy is crumbling politically at the outbreak of the war, so stealing something from them or sabotaging them wouldn't be very hard. But they will be gone from the map during the next year or so, and it is my interest to expedite their demise more than anything else. I have no time to prepare any real sabotage there, or steal some of their technology (I would have time for it if I started at earlier date). I just want their national unity to decrease so they surrender faster – which might save me thousands of soldiers and a lot of fuel. That last victory point in a city behind a river that could hold for months, they might surrender without me having to take it first - all thanks to my spy actions.

USA are a free-market democracy without any repression measures allowing my spies to navigate there with more impunity, and their quickly expanding technological base now that they started gearing up for the war will be the perfect target for theft by my spies. Other actions aren't really useful against them, starting 1940 I have no real shot at altering their politics and I don't really need to know what they are building – as they are a fairly distant enemy at this point. It'll be perfect if I can steal something from their wide array of naval technology.

Finally the Soviets. Heh, the Soviets. A considerably backward and a very totalitarian country. We'll be invading them in late 1941 (please, noone tell Stalin!). And there's really nothing I'd want to steal from them, or nothing I can do to alter their political situation. I want to do two things in Russia – one is lowering their unity to prevent them from raising it too high so they don't defend as long against my offensive, something similar to what I'm doing in France – but with a more long-term reach. Second is to accumulate covert operation points to use against them during the initial invasion – which has to be done in advance, so while it's (kinda) too late to do it in France by now, I have plenty of time to accumulate points to spend later in Russia.

Off the screen I quickly set up passive spy networks in more relevant bigger countries in the world – just to be able to view them without risking my spies and having to replace them constantly. I want to have eyes on Spain, Persia, Brazil, Venezuela and Nat. China, among other countries, and see what they are up to, what they are building, how their politics works. While doing that, I decided to show you how setting up a coup looks like. Though Germans being a supporters of a very fringe (and banned all over) party have little success if they don't start preparing a country for a coup early in the game, Me playing from a 1940 start it's probably a number of years away before I can get a Nazi party to enough strength somewhere. But I'll set it up anyway, just to show how it's done now, let's say in New Zealand (because why not).

I need three things for a coup, and me having a debug build, I'm told by the game what those things are. First I need to promote my own party in the country to be popular enough to be able to take over. Second, I need to increase the chances of the coup by lowering target's national unity. Third, I need covert points in the country to pull off the coup itself. I set priorities accordingly, all three at once, so I don't need to look at New Zealand too often or shift priorities in there constantly. All that's left is giving my spies time and leadership to work on it for a while, before it's ready to launch – promoting the party being the longest part of that.

To end the article, let's look at the results of the new spy actions. The first result is my spies bringing some tech from the USA. This is really fun to keep track of – as it's a bit like "look what the cat dragged in". It can be something really valuable, or it may be a piece of trash. Whatever it is, in the setting where Germans are behind in so many naval techs, I think it's very much worth spending some of the otherwise excess leadership here.

And now the Soviets. I accumulated some covert points and they will greatly help my initial push against them. I can slow down their movements delaying their reinforcements or preventing their withdrawal, and speed up my movement in specific areas of the map. My tanks pushing through a flatland while enemy is unable to move his troops out of their way or move them to cut them off will be a common use of spies in the TFH. Multiplayer crowd will probably use battle plan theft very often to look for any hidden preparations for invasions. It sends your spies to "stake out" a part of the map around the selected province, and informs you of enemy army movements in that area. If your enemy is marching armored army group through there, you'll be able to see that on the map and react to it in due time.

Finally, I'm going to show you how military espionage works now. I wrote earlier the old "tree" display was purged, and now you get intel "on the map". So let's take a look. I quickly appoint Canaris as my head of intelligence (he's the perfect guy for this job), and tell my spies to abandon whatever they were doing and instead only bring me military intel. A number of weeks of their hard and fairly risky work in the USA allow me to see that Americans so far have three battleships and two carriers assigned to the Atlantic theater - docked in Washington and New York. I stopped stealing tech for the time being - I might resume it in a short while, now that I am updated with the newest information. American garrison placement isn't very useful for now - though it might become of use after I've dealt with the Soviets and the British.

How much leadership for all this, will ask every experienced player. Well, I'm out of space here, and it's still under development, some numbers changed while I was writing this text! So I'd rather not post any exact math in the AAR itself – as it may soon become invalid, and then you'll want to throw me into the river for misleading you. We can discuss the math and the balance of things under the post.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to post if you want something explained in more detail.

Et une petite vidéo :

Nouveau journal de développement :
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...its-amp-Pieces

Envoyé par podcat

Bonjour et bienvenue sur le dernier journal de développement consacré à Their Finest Hour. Aujourd'hui, je vais parler des améliorations et changements mineurs apportés à l'extension et qui n'avaient pas leur place dans l'un des journaux précédents.

Interface
Nous avons apporté des modifications sur l'interface des unités afin de la rendre plus facile à utiliser.
La chaîne de commandement sera désormais plus facile à organiser grâce à un tableau qui se divise désormais en deux colonnes. Cela devrait vous faire gagner du temps en vous évitant d'abuser de la molette de la souris...

Nous avons également fait en sorte que donner des ordres à une multitude d'unités soit plus simple. Vous pourrez grouper les unités et les détacher ensemble d'un QG, créer de nouveaux QG pour elles, les améliorer, définir vos priorités (renforcement, modernisation...) pour toutes les unités sélectionnées.

Pour les unités que vous sélectionnez seules, nous avons implémenté un raccourci pour les diviser en brigades grâce à un seul bouton. Pratique pour une utilisation conjointe de la nouvelle interface de la chaîne de commandement.

Mécanismes de jeu - Naval
Les cuirassés super lourds ont été améliorés, et les dégâts infligés par les groupes aériens embarqués diminués. La vitesse de regain de leur organisation sera par ailleurs la même qu'ils soient sur une base aérienne ou sur un porte-avions.
Les navires auront un nouveau modificateur, "vitesse de réparation".

Mécanismes de jeu - Généraux et traits
En général, ce sont les échelons les plus élevés de la chaîne de commandement qui gagnent le plus d'expérience, par conséquent vous verrez quels sont les généraux qui progressent le plus au cours d'une campagne.
Assigner un général à une unité lui fera perdre la moitié de son organisation. Il faudra donc éviter les transferts entre deux batailles.
Nous avons également changé le fonctionnement de certains traits, comme "tacticien aérien supérieur" qui donnera un bonus d'attaque, ou "Briseur de char" qui augmentera les statistiques d'attaque.
Enfin, pour faciliter la gestion des généraux, vous pourrez basculer rapidement de l'un à l'autre sur la carte par un simple clic, et des filtres ont été ajoutés pour vous permettre de trouver plus facilement le général ayant les traits que vous souhaitez.

Mécanismes de jeu- Equilibrage et ajustements généraux
Lorsqu'une nation faisant partie d'une faction sera vaincue, son gouvernement pourra uniquement s'exiler vers une nation majeure de cette même faction. Si les autres nations majeures sont vaincues, le pays sera immédiatement annexé. Par ailleurs, toutes les nations mineures appartenant à une faction seront automatiquement annexés dès que toutes les nations majeures de cette même faction seront vaincues.

Les avions de transports perdront la majeure partie de leur organisation suite au largage de troupes, et devront attendre pour réeffectuer la même opération.

Pour faire en sorte que l'IA japonaise se batte davantage dans le Pacifique et pour anticiper son annexion de la Chine, nous avons ajouté un objectif de guerre par défaut en Chine. Si les Japonais l'emportent, ils signeront un pacte de non agression avec la Chine et annexeront une partie de ses territoires côtiers. Grâce à cela, le Japon devrait déployer plus d'unités dans le Pacifique pour combattre les Etats Unis.

La construction d'infrastructure prendra la moitié du temps qu'il faut pour l'améliorer.

Améliorations de l'IA

Commerce - L'IA a été revue entièrement et les états gèreront leurs ressources plus intelligemment (réserves), ce qui la rendra également plus résistante sur le long terme.
Invasions - L'IA sera meilleure pour l'attaque des îles et mènera des invasions plus grandes.
Pays neutres- Les pays neutres et influencés par les différentes factions se battront pour rester neutres (en se rapprochant des autres idéologies notamment).
Resistance - Les gouvernements en exil seront plus actifs dans la constitution de réseaux de résistance et dans l'organisation d'actions contre l'occupant quans elle le jugera opportun.

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