14 DAY TRIAL // Hearts of Iron 3 arrived at the end of last week and since then much of my day has been taken up by extended playtime and by anxiously checking the official forums of the game looking for opinions, improvement ideas, reactions and, of course, the inevitable bug reports. And they all came fast and furious, with some people loving the new grand strategy title while others hated the new mechanics and the fact that the game eats up a lot of system resource.
Two of the new in-game mechanics that have quite a lot of impact in Hearts of Iron 3 are diplomacy and intelligence. They were both present in Heart of Iron 2 but their impact was pretty much limited. One could actually play the entire release while not bothering with spies at all and diplomacy was mostly relegated to making sure that you got the allies historically joining the Axis, the Allies and the Comintern.
But Hearts of Iron 3 is a much less deterministic videogame. And diplomacy and intelligence are not built on using leadership to train spies and send out diplomats, a resource which is also used to power the research efforts of your nation. My tendency as a player is to put resources into research massively and in my first two games, one as Germany and the other as the United States, I pretty much ignored intelligence and diplomatic efforts. This resulted in a loss of the war rather early.
As Germany not actively attracting minor powers to your alliance and not actively making the various allied countries seem like the bad guys means that you will see countries like Romania going to be Comintern in 1939 and the United States of America coming into the orbit of the Allies as soon as 1938. Later in the game, lack of activity on the subterfuge front might even result in Switzerland and Sweden, paragons of neutrality, moving to ally themselves with Great Britain and the USA.
I am now in the process of running a game as Germany where I try to keep myself in the diplomatic race and, with a few spies generating threat here and there and with some influence spread around, most countries are, pre-Vienna awards, somewhat attracted to the Axis.
Of course, as it's always the case with Paradox-developed games, some values could be tweaked to make sure that countries like Switzerland and Sweden never go into the war, maybe by making sure that their neutrality value is much harder to take down. And some modifiers could be introduced to ensure that the threat value is evaluated on a continental basis rather than seeing France feel threatened by Guangxi Clique.