Hearts of Iron III Review

To review this game it will be necessary to pick a nation and a start date so we can take a look at exactly what the game has to offer. For this review we are going to take a look at doing the campaign as Nazi Germany from the year 1936. 

The game is played using the provided interface. The interface is split up into several sections that make up the main components of managing your nation. The six key areas you have control over are: Diplomacy, Production, Technology, Politics, Intelligence and Statistics. Lets take a quick look at each one and see what it does.

Diplomacy

The game manages diplomacy quite realistically and it is definitely a strong point of the game, you can trade, request military access and influence nations towards your faction from the diplomacy tab. It also shows you how aligned certain nations are to the three factions on the pyramid diagram which you can see above. A top of the pyramid are three bars which show how many Victory points each of the factions have , this is the easiest place to keep track of the overall game score and check how the faction you are in is doing, or if you are still unaligned this is a good place to decide which faction you may wish to join.

You can also see any Nation-specific tasks you may have in the bottom left of this tab, for example Germany has the task “Re-Occupation of the Rheinland” and it gives you information on the conditions that need to be met for this quest or task be completed. If you are not a great fan of managing the diplomatic aspect of your nation you can switch this between User or Computer controlled.

Production

Production is perhaps the most important sector of managing your nation. Essentially here you must effectively manage the allocation of resources in your economy which can be done using the sliders in the top right hand corner of the tab. Note this can also be computer or player controlled depending on whether this tab interests you or not. In addition to that on the left hand side you can control the construction of Land, Sea and Air based military units as well as province specific upgrades.

Production is essentially the economy, your total productive capacity is measured by IC or Industrial Capacity. You have a set amount of IC based on how much all your regions added together produce. You can increase the amount by building additional IC and factories in your provinces or by capturing additional territories. The key with this tab is finding a good balance between military production and consumer based economic growth.

Technology

The technology tab lets you manage what your scientists will research into, this is very much like the production tab in its nature. You get allocated a certain number of research points based on how you choose to allocate points between diplomacy, leadership, research and espionage on the slider in the top left of the tab. Then with your research points you can select and add technological advancements that you want to develop and the research points will be put towards researching them.

There are several tabs within this tab but the main flavour here is balancing your research between military and economic purposes in order to maximise your success. Like all the other tabs you can either control this yourself or allow the AI to control it for you.