Starfire HoI 2 Documentation

Key Features compared to Vanilla HoI 2:

• Longer, more realistic combat lengths - this removes much of the "arcade" feel and adds in strategy for doing pinning attacks and other concepts that don't work in vanilla. Note: with our longer combats the features of "support attack" and "support defense" actually useful.
• Improved economics - resources and IC and other aspects of the economy are more realistic and more historical. Some of the benefits of this include the "Battle of the Atlantic" is a viable strategy, resources and shortages of them become a concern.
• Ten models of Infantry, Mountain, Marine, Motorized, Garrison and Militia allow more accurate OOBs and avoid devastating tech level difference problems.
• Submarines more realistic thus vs convoys and vs surface ships is more realistic.
• More realistic manpower limitations
• USA-UK Lend Lease events fixed so they don't fire every time you load a save game

This is documentation of how HoI 2 works (currently v1.3a) with Starfire modification specific notes.

Diplomacy / International Affairs - alliances, belligerence, trade, etc.

Units - notes about divisions and attachments

Manpower -

• Province MP point = 100,000 actual population, thus a province with 5 manpower is a real world population of 500,000 people in that province.
• In game (unit) MP point = 100 (deployed) men (147 military personnel), thus an infantry division costing 170 manpower points reflects 17,000 deployed men in the field or 24,990 military personnel.
• Reinforcement - to replace a lost manpower point only costs one half of a manpower point (50% wounded recycled).

Reinforcement - vanilla HoI 2 has reinforcement cheap in manpower(80%), time (50%) and cost (50%). Vanilla reinforcement cost is 1/4th (25%) the cost of building a division from scratch. Starfire has increased the manpower cost to 100% (thus reinforcing a division costs just as much manpower as building it from scratch). Note: because of "trickle back" only 25% of manpower losses are actually lost manpower (vanilla is 50%). Starfire has increased the time for reinforcement to 100% and reduced the cost to 20%. Thus reinforcing in Starfire is slightly cheaper (but slower) than in vanilla. Allocating more IC than required is a waste of IC.

Upgrading - vanilla HoI2 has upgrading far too fast and the government sliders create far too great of a variance.

Starfire (E8) is now using a time factor of 1.0 in both misc.txt and in the unit files. This will result in an upgrade time range of a low of 15% faster than build time to 2.25 times longer than building (target goal on average of roughly equal to 60% longer than build time). However the cost (20%) is extremely low ranging from 17% to 45% of build cost (i.e. upgrading twice is slightly cheaper than building fresh in the worst case). Infantry type units have half the cost of upgrading of armor type units.

Government Sliders

All major nations experienced severe manpower shortages as the war went on. This meant that no army could be purely "professional" and drafting of soldiers was essential. To reflect this, every nine months events fire to lower the "professional_army" slider, thus even if a player uses all of his optional slider movements to move his army toward a professional army it will slowly lose ground and become more and more of a draft army. Soviets and USA are exempted for Feb, Nov 1943 & August 1944 (thus they can improve toward the end of the war)

Free Market vs Central Planning is now limited to remain between 4 and 8. (this is to avoid extremes that are too extreme)

Resources

The oil conversion rates have been dramatically reduced. This means more energy (coal) will be converted to oil leading to overall a lot less energy (coal) and oil.

National Notes:

England/UK

Germany

USA - Event 33 (hoi2.txt) is triggered if London is captured or Vichy declared and raise interventionism; usa.txt event 3750 lowers interventionism by 3 pts to avoid early USA aggression. Election of Roosevelt in Nov 1940 raises interventionism (at this point historically a player could potentially declare war as USA against belligerence of 59).

USA Gear Up events (ver F3A):

• 56 - Trigger Ger 24 or JAP 30 Belligerence; +3 IC +5% Peacetime effect; 1200 Manpower
• 57 - Trigger Ger 35 or JAP 40 Belligerence; +2 IC +5% Peacetime effect; 1300 Manpower
• 58 - Trigger Ger 51 or JAP 45 Belligerence; +2 IC +7% Peacetime effect; 1400 Manpower
• 102 - Trigger Ger 60 or JAP 55 Belligerence; +2 IC +7% Peacetime effect; 1400 Manpower
• 103 - Trigger Ger 70 or JAP 60 Belligerence; +2 IC +6% Peacetime effect; 1500 Manpower

USSR - Russia is the only nation that is allowed to move completely to "Central Planning" (after May 1939) and it is important the Soviet player does this to gain the 25% boost in IC.