I need to play a game to get my mind off things so I'm going to go with HOI3. My singular goal (no doubt very unoriginal) will be to choose a country and get it into the atomic age before anyone else, along with a suitable delivery platform of any produced weapons. So, what I need from you HOI3 grogs is:
1) What countries have strong potential to develop an atom bomb
2) What countries have significant means to develop high altitude long range bombers and/or medium range ballistic missiles?
3) What counties have the above that are able to stay non-aligned long enough to get things rolling and not too close to future Axis/Allied combatants to be early appetizers?
Also, any tech-tree guides for speedy shortcuts for progress towards a bomb and missiles? I'm not trying to create a superpower, I'm more interested in shepherding a smaller country to the point of "Nobody will frakk with us now!".
USA would fit your requirements easily.
Here's a bunch of things to get your teeth into:
http://www.paradoxian.org/hoi3wiki/Reference
http://www.paradoxian.org/hoi3wiki/Strategy
http://www.paradoxian.org/hoi3wiki/Country_guides
Thanks for the links IanC. I'll check them out.
I was hoping to avoid playing any of the 'biggies' (or commonwealth nations to stay neutral). Brazil, Sweden, any other candidates? I'm not familiar enough with the game to know their potential.
I'd be surprised if you could get a non-aligned country *other* than the USA into the atomic age. I doubt Brazil or Sweden or any other non-aligned has the industrial or 'leadership' capacity to make it feasible. Really, other than USA, UK, Germany, USSR, maybe France (?), maybe Japan (?), I can't see other countries even trying to rush nuclear techs being able to pull it off.
If nothing else, though, I recommend you play with Lothos's "Total Realism Project" mod -- it doesn't really change the game appearance (game still feels vanilla to me even with TRP), but it's a huge advance in computer opponent AI. And it's also very easy to install.
Do the commonwealth nations have some leeway as to how much of their resources they devote to war if/when they get dragged in by the UK? Is involvement automatic?
Quote from: Staggerwing on February 02, 2014, 05:49:00 PM
Do the commonwealth nations have some leeway as to how much of their resources they devote to war if/when they get dragged in by the UK? Is involvement automatic?
I believe you are in the Allies at the start and will be drug into any war with the Axis. However, I don't think you have to actually participate in the war if you don't want to (unless it comes to you as in India or Australia). Being in a war may actually help you as your consumer goods requirement will go down, freeing up IC to build the reactors and strategic bombers you'll need.
As far as which country to play, you would want one with the most Leadership points so you can research the needed techs. In addition, you will need to build a reactor as some point and they are very expensive. Brazil might be your best bet of the non-aligned countries. You may want to start up a game and 'tag switch' between countries and see how much IC/Leadership points they get. You'll need to know the 3-letter codes for all the countries you want to check.
Thanks- Where do I find the 3 letter codes and how do I switch back and forth? Also, How would Canada be for a choice? After all, the Manhattan Project's uranium came from the Northwest Territories IIRC.
Here is part of post from paradox forums:
To switch to a country mid-game, bring up console and use the TAG cheat command (TAG taghere, replace taghere with the tag of the country, for example GER being Germany, ENG being United Kingdom, SOV being USSR, USA being USA, POL being Poland, FRA being France etc., you can check the other country tags in the country files somewhere in the common folder AFAIK). After switching tags and viewing all those countries, I suggest resigning (DON'T SAVE after you've switched to another country) and then loading back as your country, I've had some weird issues with tag switching in HoI III (like strategic resources that I don't even have showing up in production screen cause the country I tag switched to had them).
I don't know a good source for the 3 letter tags. I have opened up a save game and you can find the tags in a big list where a country has it's diplomacy settings stored. Unfortunately, you have to guess what country goes with each Tag. Most are obvious. I would guess Canada's is CAN. Not sure what Brazil's would be.
Forgot to mention, for my computer, opening the console is by pressing Alt and then the 1 and 2 keys simultaneously.
Thanks!