SGO: Land unit Elite formations are planned to either be built by special construction or ‘developed’ by the accumulation of experience. Is there a possibility of the same thing happening for naval or air units? Will players be able to name ‘elite’ formations themselves? Is the creation of elite divisions going to have a beneficial effect on dissent back home?

Paradox: Currently we have only thought about elite land forces. The names of the units will probably be historical rather than customizable and their creation will not affect dissent. We have had some rather heated discussions about whether elite units should receive the status through amassing experience or be deliberately created as a kind of propaganda units (with the best equipment, etc). It will probably be the latter (the “experience” system might become an optional rule though.)

SGO: Unit formations right now have a very ‘fixed’ combat value – every Mechanized Infantry unit will be the same as every other unit. Will there be any national variation, or is this variation seen more as a result of training (tech), equipment (tech), doctrine (leadership), morale (organization), etc? There should be at least some random factor? If there is some variety, is there any way to spend more time/IC on a unit, to increase it’s chance to have slightly higher starting values?

Paradox: There will be no hard-coded national differences. Instead, we aim to represent this by differing technological and doctrinal prowess. For example, in 1936 Italy might have researched no advances in “land doctrine” at all whereas Germany might start with more than half of them already discovered. This would mean that Italian land units would have a maximum organizational value of around 50% compared to a considerably higher value (say 90%) for the Germans. Add to this a purely technological gap and an enormous qualitative difference in the available leader pool and you should end up with pretty historical relative strengths. Random combat values for divisions? Nope.

SGO: Will elite forces have other benefits, reflecting their seasoned status and favored position within the military hierarchy? For example, recoup their organization any faster or be more resistant to surrender/break effects?

Paradox: Yes, in all likelihood they will recoup organization faster, fight to the last man, and might even receive all new equipment upgrades automatically. These are supposed to be showpiece units after all.

SGO: Will military leaders have more than one ‘tactical ability’? What about ministers?

Paradox: Military leaders at least will be able to gain more perks, but this should be quite rare and only happen under extraordinary circumstances.

SGO: The whole scheduled-movement system is a brilliant idea but seems like it’s also going to open a can of worms. During scheduled movement, what happens to a unit during the transit time? If a unit has to move two regions away (let’s assume it’s a minimum 1 week trip), but they have a month to do it, is it considered they spend 15 days in each region? How far out (in time or distance) will these sorts of orders carry – could you take a fresh naval unit in Florida and tell it to move to Japan? How will you keep a potentially complex web of these orders clear for the player?

Paradox: It is not as complicated as it might appear: You give a unit an order to be carried out at a certain time and the computer (in its role as commander of the unit) decides when it has to start moving in order to arrive at the correct moment. Once scheduled movement begins it is treated exactly like normal movement. Hopefully we will not have to impose any limits on these orders in time or distance. Visualization of scheduled orders will probably take the form of little icons next to task forces.

SGO: Allied-force synchronization – will there be a way to find out where/when allied forces are planning an attack? How will allies be able to plan joint efforts? I can see two human players colluding but how will this work with the AI? What about allied shared movement – allied forces in a single task force, or allied planes/transports carrying each other’s soldiers/materiel? Lend-lease: is there a possibility for a country building forces for another ally?

Paradox: You can receive intelligence about planned enemy maneuvers through the semi-random intelligence events (semi-random because the chance is affected by research and leader and minister bonuses.) There will be “expeditionary forces”; i.e. the (temporary) lending of a task force to another country, placing it under the control of the receiver. You will also be able to build units for each other (manned by the receiver), and to transport allied units in your ships or airplanes. As for planning joint efforts I don’t see the problem as long as players talk to each other. J

SGO: What about capturing enemy equipment? Could this be employed as a discount for unit production? A significant proportion of German garrison units were equipped with captured equipment such as the former-French S-35 or the former BEF 25-pounder artillery – how could this be represented? What about naval production? The plan document suggests a ‘naval shipyard’ rule – does this mean that ships will be constructed in a specific location, and are capturable? Is it possible that certain leaders/units will ‘defect’ to an ally when a nation falls (like the Free French or Polish pilots in the Battle of Britain)? Can an ally’s units be attacked to prevent them from falling into the enemy’s hands (the French Fleet comes to mind)?

Paradox: Captured equipment might be represented in the game as an automatic replenishing of operational strength for the attacking units, but that’s about as far as I expect we will go with that. You cannot attack allied units; you will have to wait until the allied country has fallen (and possibly been replaced by a puppet regime), or by first declaring war on your ally. Of course, leaders and units can defect when their country is occupied (there is a whole rule-set for that).

SGO: The unit-break and unit-surrender values seem rather fixed. Will this vary based on any factors like nationality, weather, and current-combat enemies? Elite status? What about the effect of isolation on surrender? If a unit cannot retreat, does that mean it will continue to keep fighting until surrender? Does it cost a state resources to take/hold prisoners, and is there a cost for NOT taking them?

Paradox: None of the values in the design document are set in stone. The beta phase will surely lead to a lot of changes, and some constants might become variables. Elite status will probably affect the values you mention, yes. PoWs will magically vanish… J

SGO: Your design doc states that manpower resources were fixed over the span of time of WW2, but you intend to cover 1936-47 – in 11 years a half-generation of men would be available. How are you going to implement ‘desperation manpower’, the drafting of younger boys and old men normally not considered part of the manpower pool unless the country is in mortal danger?

Paradox: Good questions. There will be a slow regeneration of the manpower, although it will not be nearly as significant as in EU 2. Once your recruiting pool runs out, you will be unable to construct normal units. We might allow players to overdraw manpower a bit, representing the types of units you mention, but this is a feature on the “if there is time” list.

SGO: Tactical support missions are currently something that needs to be set up by the player. I’m curious at that as a design decision – might it be a more realistic effect to have tactical bombers deployed more integrally to land forces (ie the tac-air missions would be seen as taking place below the resolution of the game and as bonuses to the land/sea force attacks, rather than a separately-calculated attack themselves)?

Paradox: There are many reasons for this decision, but the most important one is simply that we believe it will give the player a bit more freedom. Wise players will want to bomb enemy units just before the ground pounders move in, but he won’t have to risk getting his precious planes shot to pieces by heavy flak fire if he doesn’t want to. Of course we could have dropped tactical bombers altogether, but that would not have felt right even though this is a strategic level game.

SGO: I’m curious how air-interception will be handled. Since the document discusses the portrayal of ‘circles’ showing interception radii, how will this absolute range-limit integrate with the irregularly-shaped ‘regions’ on the ground map? If one of the ‘range’ circles slightly intersects a large region, does that mean that air unit can freely intercept into that region (even if the furthest edge may be double the plane’s range away)? Will the air-activity map layer be distinct from that of ground units, allowing air units to freely navigate around intercepting bases?

Paradox: All air units have a range, given in miles or kilometers. This corresponds to distances of actual pixels on the map. The compromise with the provincial system is that planes can only reach a province if the center point of the province lies within range. This will be visualized by lighting up all provinces within the operational radius.

SGO: There have been whole games based on the management of interceptors and the planning of aerial campaigns. How will, for example, a defender order fighter bases to limit their interceptions to reduce supply consumption or pilot losses? Will there be a ‘probe’ air attack, which might trigger interceptions prematurely, allowing a later bomber strike to pass by less threatened by interceptors?

Paradox: Interception will be a fairly simple affair, where success basically depends on distance and quickness of detection. However, what you will see at first is an enemy task force consisting of an unknown number of planes, of unknown types. As they draw closer you will get more facts about them, but if you’ve already scrambled your fighters it might be too late if the bogies turned out to be a feint, with other task forces approaching on other vectors. There should be at least some opportunity for tactics… we hope. J

SGO: How will HoI handle the strategic resource of pilots? Will it track them separately? They are more restricted than manpower, and far more limiting on a nation’s ability to project air power than the number of airframes that are built. What about the recruiting of pilots from other allied nations?

Paradox: As agonizing as the decision was to make, there will be no separate pilot pool.

SGO: Naval task forces – how will CAP be handled? Will certain segments of the air wings assigned to carriers be determined to be on CAP? If there’s only one air flotilla assigned to a carrier, does this mean that strikes by that flotilla will be weaker (i.e. the CAP is maintained?) or if the strike is full strength does that imply that the CAP is retracted?

Paradox: For simplicity’s sake, CAP will be abstracted into higher air defense and attack values on carriers than the ships themselves actually warrant.

SGO: How will the morale effects of isolation be applied? On the one hand, you have the envelopment factor that seems to address the pockets of the Eastern Front, but how will this apply to isolated island garrisons in the Pacific? Their ‘isolated’ status had less to do with the positions of enemy naval units, but rather more to do with the ability of friendly naval forces to remain ‘in being’ even if they were not adjacent. (Example, the nightly supply runs by the IJN to the defenders on Guadalcanal).

Paradox: Interesting point, although the phenomenon is not exactly comparable to “envelopment”; that being a combat modifier representing the confusion that arises when a force is attacked from multiple directions at once. As I see it, the important thing is simply keeping your poor isolated island troops in supply.

SGO: The political system seems flexible but again there’s the question of determinism vs. flexibility. I’m sure people would like to see your thoughts on how much freedom/restriction each player should have to follow the course of history. To mention a few examples: clearly the US player is going to want to get into the war – are they going to be able to pursue a Pacific-War strategy first if they want? If Britain falls, will the war continue to the invasion of the US? What about Churchill’s constant fear that Stalin would either come to an accommodation with Hitler or drop out of the war entirely? Can Russia (as human or AI) do this?

Paradox: Human players have a very large degree of freedom (AI players can be made deliberately stupid), although some hard limits have to be imposed due to that much-dreaded 20/20 hindsight. For example, the USA cannot enter the war until certain conditions are met, and can never be a member of the Axis or Comintern alliances. The CCCP on the other hand has the option to join any of the three alliances (but while she is a member of the Axis or Allies, the Comintern/Warsaw Pact will lie dormant). For the various minors, things are much more free (since their ability to make use of 20/20 hindsight is much more limited.) There are no hard limits against a possible invasion of the USA, but hopefully the game mechanics will make such a gambit near-impossible.

SGO: How are dissident populations in distant possessions handled? I’m thinking particularly of the British concern that Nazi agents would be able to fan discontent against British Rule in India or Egypt.

Paradox: Autonomous countries can be the targets of various political and clandestine actions, but I don’t think India and Egypt quite fit into that category. It would be a cool feature though. J

SGO: One of the more broadly-questioned decisions of EU was the implentation of ‘terra incognita’ – lands which were unexplorable because historically they had never been explored at that time by any of the primary states. In HoI will the whole map be in play? Could we see Fallschimjaeger dropping out of the skies into Patagonia? What about Japanese troops in Madagascar? Even Finnish troops in the arctic?

Paradox: There will be no blank spots on the HoI map like there were in EU, so the things you mention will indeed be possible. However, there are still regions of the globe outside the scope of the map – e.g. the polar caps and parts of Siberia and North America.

Thank you Paradox for taking the time with us again!

Editor’s Note: It should be noted that Paradox did fail to formally answer the following question, and the informal replies from the design team were mixed, suggesting a critical design debate in the future: “Since it is possible to start HoI in 1936, is it possible that the Nazi’s do get the Ark of the Covenant?”

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