Hearts of Iron 3: Their Finest Hour

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

I received a free copy of Hearts of Iron 3 from Paradox several months ago but, due to a large backlog of games, I never even got around to installing it as I'm not the biggest fan of Paradox games.  Anyway, I've been reading a lot about Bomber Command lately and I wanted to play something with at least some element of strategic bombing so I picked up the Their Finest Hour DLC on sale at GG and fired up the game.

I've never played an HOI game before and I'm finding the learning curve to be pretty steep.  I've been reading through and watching various tutorials on the net and I think I'm beginning to get a handle on things but I do have some questions.

I started the game in 1936 and decided to play as France.  I figured it would be the simplest country to start with in that all you really need to do is try to survive the German onslaught.  I spent two years getting the economy in order, extending the Maginot line, and building up a lot of infantry and artillery (as well as researching tech for them) as well as pulling all my colonial troops back to France.

It's now spring 1940 in my game and the Germans are starting to attack me now as they've just overrun the Low Countries and are in the process of knocking off Norway.  My units seem to have better numbers than the Germans, are on the defensive, and have fortresses and terrain to their advantage yet they often seem to just retreat out of a zone with zero casualties.  Their organization numbers are nowhere near zero so why are they retreating?  I've got them well sorted in divisions/corps/ army/ army group/HQ hierarchy and have decent leaders at all levels.

As for air power, is there a way to co-ordinate it with ground forces for attack or defence?  I tried using the battle planner tool, but I can't seem to get it to function.  I send in tac bombers with fighter cover on daylight attacks but they don't seem to do much except get their organization knocked down to zero and then I have to order them back to base to refit.  Any tips?

Also, the game seems to crash at random intervals on two different PCs (Win 7 and Win 8).  Any idea why it crashes so much?

I'm enjoying the game more than I thought I would so far but much of the game's inner workings are still confusing to me.

[MetalDog]

I am not as familiar with 3 as I am with 2, so what I suggest may not apply.  In 2, you could go to any battle currently being fought and hover over the screen for tooltips explaining what was going on.  Usually, if a battle you thought was supposed to be going your way was doing the opposite, it had to do with overstacking.  There is a severe penalty for having too many units under the command of an officer not capable of handling those numbers.   

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Yes, I get the tooltip for some battles and I've been very careful not to over stack.  However, some battles end instantaneously with my units just retreating and zero casualties in either side.  I have no idea why.  They have supply. They're fully mobilized and at full strength.  They have good organization.  They're in command range but they just leave. 

[Swatter]

Without seeing your game, it is tough to know what is going on. Perhaps you have you time scale set really high, the moment you un-pause the game, the battle happens really fast. Otherwise I am not sure why the battles are happening so fast.

You have to realize, though, the organization bar is relative. Your units might be at full organization, but your max organization might be 30 while the German organization is usually 70+ max. If the enemy has a much higher organization and your organization is low, the battles will be short.

Airpower is a tough thing to properly control. Stacking is particularly important with airpower, because it is easy to over-stack and the penalties are high. Plus, if your A/C are operating in a non-air superiority environment, they can be mauled quickly and it is hard to detect in a timely manner. Plus you need to be careful not to set your A/C operate in 24/7 missions, that will also run down their organization. To me, airpower is work intensive, but it is also essential to ground operations.

[MetalDog]

Swatter makes a good point.  Until you reach a state of war, organization levels are low.  The research to bring your maximum org. up are spaced rather far apart and don't reach the level of the Germans until late in the war, like '43 or '44.  A General with a trait, such as Panzer Leader or Offensive Doctrine for instance, can also gain signifigant bonuses in their bailiwick.  Or it could just be that the French are cheese eating surrender monkeys (sorry.  I lifted that from someone else and always thought it was a pretty funny dig.)

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Most of my units have an I organization value of 54 when the bar is full.  No idea what the Boche have.  As my goal was to cower in my bunkers, I placed division lvl officers with defensive doctrine perks in command of my frontline units.  I made most divs out of 3 Inf brigades and 1 arty brigade.  I also put 1 div of 3 TD brigades and 1 engineer brigade in as many stacks as I could.  It's usually these TD/eng divs that leg it back to Paris for the cheese.

On a brighter note, my navy has blown nine kinds of hell out of the German and Italian fleets.  Seems to have stopped the Krauts from reinforcing their attack on Norway at any rate.   They've been stalled for 3 months.

[MetalDog]

Not being familiar with the best Division setups, I can't say why or why not something works.  I would think that 3 TD's wouldn't give enough, I don't know, bass, to keep the Germans at bay.  Enjoy your cheese :)

[eyebiter]

Combined arms changed with Their Finest Hour.  Now when you build divisions the best bonus appears when you have different types of units attached.

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?627976-Hearts-of-Iron-III-Their-Finest-Hour.-DD-4.-Combined-Arms-and-Leader-Traits

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

It's really hard to find a good divisional mix.  To get the Combined Arms bonus with Their Finest Hour, you've really got to mix and match units.  I think having only 1 infantry brigade with 3 support units makes it pretty brittle.  It may perform well in one fight, but it's not going to last two.  Also, it really makes it hard to play as a minor power as you just don't have the leadership stats to spread out your research.  It's all well and good to have an inf bde, some arty, light armour, and some engineers in your division but if your arty and tanks are still based on 1918 tech, they're still going to get ground up when they meet Mr. Rommel's panzers.

Damn it!  I WILL find a way to stop the Boche at the Maginot line!  I will! 

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

I've been playing the grand campaign as France for a few weeks now and I'm having a blast.

After a few false starts when I was learning the interface and game conventions, I think I've finally cracked it as France.

France is a mess in 1936.  National unity is in the toilet. The armed forces are numerous but with poor leadership, worse morale, and using WWI era weapons and tactics.
I figured the first and only duty of France is to survive the German onslaught long enough for the Allies to build up and turn the tide.  As such, I pulled all colonial forces back to France, broke up the default organizational structure, and rebuilt the army organization from the ground up so that I had as much command control as possible.  (4 brigades to a division, 5 divisions to a corps, 5 corps to an army, 5 armies to an army group, 5 groups to an HQ).  I focused all my national leadership into research and expanding the officer pool and severely curtailed diplomacy and  only put enough in espionage to build up a strong domestic network.  Once that was done, I put my intelligence agencies to work manipulating the French populace in an effort to re-build national pride and unity. 

From 1936 to Sept '39, I concentrated solely on modernizing the army with a defensive POV in mind.  As such, I threw all my R&D into infantry, artillery, and AT weapons and tactics.  I built as many reserve divisions comprising 2 infantry brigades, 1 arty, and 1 AT brigade as I could manage and stacked them along the Maginot line.  I ignored Belgium's protest and extended the line of forts from the Alsace region along the Luxemburg and Belgian borders all the way up to Dunkirk.   France's industrial capacity is pretty low in '36 so it was a juggling act to throw points into unit production to build new units and forts or into modernizing gear.  At any rate, I was able to build up my army to enough of an extent that I had at least 2 divisions in every province along the border from the English Channel to the Mediterranean (expect for the Swiss border) and had 3 in several key locations. 

When war broke out in Sept '39, I was able to get national unity up to 72%, had thoroughly modern infantry, arty, and AT units, an officer replenishment rate of 140%(even though the officers coming out of St. Cyr were a pretty middling lot), and enough spies in Germany to build up an insurgency network strong enough to attempt to stage a coup should the opportunity arise.     

Germany rolled over Poland in less than three weeks and later that autumn Denmark fell in 6 days.  Winter hit and the Sitskrieg started.  I desperately threw more divisions forward and built up my forts along the Belgian border a little more.  In the spring of 1940, I threw the majority of the quite robust French navy into the maelstrom of the North Sea.  In a series of brutal engagements, the French and Brit navies got the best of the Kriegsmarine and the Bismark, the Graf Spee, and the Schleswig-Holstein were sent to the bottom for the loss of one French battleship and two heavy cruisers.  The Tirpitz and the Prince Eugen were forced to hole up in Kiel and the Allies were able to stop the German invasion of Norway.

I continued to build up through the rest of the spring, cringing at the thought of what the Blitzkrieg was going to do to my lines (they ripped through me in a few weeks in my previous attempts).  In late May the Germans hit the Netherlands with everything they had. With the French and Brit navies controlling the North Sea, the Brits gambled and landed their expeditionary force on the German coast and pressed toward Bremen.  I resisted the temptation to throw my forces over the line and try to counter-attack and instead stayed in my forts.  I sent the French air force to aid the Dutch but they were totally out-classed by the Luftwaffe.   My flyboys didn't even last a day before being driven back to their aerodromes in disgrace.  The Brits had some initial success and seized Hamburg and Bremen but they just didn't have the manpower to stand up to the full might of the Wehrmacht and were driven into the sea in September, a month later Holland fell just about the same time that Belgium finally gave up the ghost.

The British had shot their bolt and failed and I was on tenterhooks dreading my turn in front of the panzers and hoping that I'd delayed them long enough that they'd sit out the winter.  Such was not the case and they hit the Maginot line in late September.  I was expecting a repeat of my last playthroughs with the Germans slicing through my lines but all the effort I put into not only researching the latest gear, but also ensuring that my troops were all equipped with it paid off and I was able to hold the Germans at the border.  It was a close-run thing and if the Royal Air Force hadn't come to drive off the Stukas, I could very well have lost but thanks to those Spitfires, I held the line and in mid-October, the Germans pulled back to lick their wounds. 

About this time, the Italians decided to get stuck in and they went on a tear in North Africa.  They drove the Brits back to Alexandria and pushed up to Tunis.  I had stationed a few garrison units in North Africa in late 1939 and, while they initially held their own, they were eventually driven back by the Italian regulars.  I'd caught a reprieve after the Germans pulled back for the winter so I sent two divisions of infantry and one of armor to Tunis in an effort to save our colonies. 

The Italian navy might not have the professionalism of the Germans, but they certainly have numbers on their side.  The battles of the Western Med were even more brutal than those of the North Sea but again, the Anglo-French alliance prevailed and the majority of Mussolini's capital ships went to the bottom.  Unfortunately, not before they'd hammered my convoy of transports with battleship battlegroup escort.  My armored div and one of the inf divs lost 50% of their forces during the crossing. 

The remaining armor was more than the Italians could cope with and we were able to drive them back to Tripoli by November and take the city by December.  In the east, the Brits and Iraqis pushed the Italians all the way back to Benghazi.  During this time, the Germans launched repeated bombing raids against my naval base in Cherbourg and it quickly became apparent that the French planes were not up to snuff.  I bought a license from the UK to produce a few squadrons of Spitfires.  I also started building 3 divisions of marines and two of armor.  In Feb '41, they were ready and I launched an invasion of Sardinia.  Once again, the Italian navy made my life miserable and snuck past my battleship group and hammered my transports.  I lost marine 3 brigades before we hit the beaches but they had only a token garrison unit defending the island and it quickly fell.

With Sardinia in Allied hands, the shipping lanes in the Western Med were secure and I was able reinforce my North African forces in the summer of '41.  All this time, I was on guard for another German push at the Maginot line, but this never materialized.  They limited themselves to aerial attacks but the RAF blunted much of this, and once I'd built RADAR stations along the Belgian border, the Luftwaffe's effectiveness was greatly reduced.


I continued building my forces in North Africa and Sardina and in the fall of 1941, I launched a two pronged invasion of Sicily with the marines landing at Palermo from Sardinia and my armor and infantry hitting Siracusa from Tripoli.  The initial landings went off without a hitch but immediately the Wehrmacht reacted and began marching down the boot of Italy for the Straits of Messina.  A pretty intense race developed as I sent my armor rushing forward while the marines mopped up the Italian resistance.  I flung my antiquated French tactical bombers at the Germans in an attempt to slow them down.  They were chewed up dreadfully but I won the race and got one armored division to Messina 2 hours before the Germans attempted their crossing from the toe of Italy with 5 motorized infantry divisions.  They almost succeeded in driving my armor back, but fire from my battleships and the timely arrival of my 2nd armored division stopped the Germans cold on Christmas day. 

In what I can only assume was a fit of pique at failing to cross the straits, the Germans launched a new offensive aimed at Dunkirk.  And they came with new, heavy tanks.  A very, very ugly fight ensured with 3 of my 4 divisions getting driven back.  I sent some armor in to re-enforce Dunkirk and they, along with the final infantry division and the RAF, once again stopped the Germans.

It's now May 1942 and that's where things stand.  I've just completed another massive round of upgrades to my infantry, arty, and AT.  I've got the air force to the point where the fighters can hold their own on defensive intercepts but the bomber force is still useless.  I'm simultaneously anticipating and dreading the next German onslaught.  The sad fact is that they're out-producing me at a 2-1 ratio and none of my allies is really up to much.  The Brits are doing a great job of controlling the air and sea, but they still haven't recovered from their losses in Bremen and have limited themselves to a few nuisance raids in Denmark to aid the partisans there.

I had hoped that the Germans would've turned east to the USSR but it looks like they're going to try to knock me out of the fight before they do.

The Russians have mobilized but are content to sit on their borders.  The Yanks are steadfastly neutral and the Japanese have decided to leave them alone in favour of mopping up China. 

Can't wait to see how it all plays out!   

[Yskonyn]

Wow thanks for the write up!
Very cool! Let us know how you fare next.
Would you say HoI 3 is worth learning now? Rhetorical perhaps? ;)
The UI and countless of screens are pretty daunting to me, but I have the game for ages now and really want to get into it.
What did you do to learn the interface? Just play and restart?

[Nefaro]

Hey SDR..  Have they improved the AI enough so that you don't have to micro-manage your masses of military units so much (in HOI3)? 

I recall reports of the AI mucking up troop movements so much that HQ's subordinates were placed out of supply/command fairly regularly, and other such annoyances, when attacks were delegated.

[Tuna]

Excellent AAR SDR, thanks for sharing!... Glad you didn't give up on the game!.. Makes me want to give it another shot now!

[Rayfer]

Excellent AAR SDR, thanks for sharing!... Glad you didn't give up on the game!.. Makes me want to give it another shot now!

+1.....well done, look forward to seeing how it plays out.

[Greybriar]

Excellent AAR SDR, thanks for sharing!... Glad you didn't give up on the game!.. Makes me want to give it another shot now!

Add another +1 for me. Great AAR! Thanks, SDR.