Hello everyone! This weeks topic will be the side effects of war: Occupation and Resistance.
Resistance
The main goal of modeling local resistance in HOI4 is to remove whack-a-mole of rebels running around and to model the strategic problems with occupying large chunks of enemy territory.
Each occupied state you control has a resistance value indicating the strength of the resistance there. It will slowly grow over time. To reduce or halt growth you need to station troops in the area (preferably special divisions with military police support battalions which are very effective for this) or lower your occupation policy for the nation in question.
As the resistance grows in an area it has several effects:
- available supply is reduced creating bottlenecks
- your enemies get increased intel and will be able to see more of what is going on
- factories will suffer from sabotage and will need to be repaired
- troops will take more attrition
So it’s important to station troops to combat this, but of course that ties up valuable divisions you might want to use to fight the enemy. You can also appoint ministers with the Prince of Terror trait which will help to combat resistance growth in your occupied areas.
Occupation policies
You can set occupation policies for each nation you occupy. They range from Gentlest to Harshest, where harshest has the most aggressive resistance growth but lets you exploit the most
Gentlest:
– least factories
– local resources
– least resources
+ most manpower
+ less resistance growth
Harshest:
+ most resources
+ most factory output
+ most resources
– no manpower
– fastest resistance growth
Handing over occupation
Unlike say EU4 or some of our other games, in Hearts of Iron a lot of the map tends to be occupied for most of the game rather than a short period, so it is important to be able to control the occupation during playing. To help with this we have included diplomatic actions where you can select states you occupy on the map and offer the occupation to an ally. This doesn’t give them more score for a future peace conference, but it does give them the benefits of the area (industry, resources etc). AI will be quite happy to hand you stuff if you are doing the heavy lifting in the war as well and you can hand over areas you don’t have troops to manage, or simply don’t care about.
See you all next week again when we will be talking about battle plans!
