HEARTS OF IRON: Progress?

Spring, 1936-- Having learned a hard lesson in Rezekne, I spent most of the winter months trying to get my needs for rubber filled, as rubber is one of four main currencies of HoI. The other three are steel, oil and coal. The USSR at this point in history had complete stockpiles of everything but rubber, and it was noted in the manual that I could convert oil to rubber on the fly at a 2 to 1 rate. Good for covering me for the moment, but not sustainable from the way the totals for oil kept dropping. I set up some offers on the 'world market', a system by which you can post a trade offer and leave it there, as in "100 coal for 100 rubber" and other nations of the world can simply trade with you at that rate unrestricted until you take it down. It seemed to me like a great way to distill world demand for goods into a simple system, but I could find no way to take up computer-played nations on their offers some of which had better rates of exchange than my own. I also attempted to set up shipping convoys to get more rubber, but the interface there was so incomprehensible I just decided to stay on the world market as that was already giving me positive results.

At the end of April I checked the weather map and sent my forces into Latvia with confidence. It didn't take long for the battle to be over with the USSR victorious. Happy to just be a winner I cooled my army boots in Rezekne while internal affairs became more insistent.

Winter, 1937-- It was around this time a few things happened. First I had noticed that some idiot had given every command position in my armies to some faceless rube with no points in skill or experience for command. In the manual commanders were supposed to have these two traits as well as other notes on them like "Defensive Doctrine" or "Panzer Leader" that set them apart from one another, none of those either. So I spent a long time fitting the positions to the commanders, of which there were around one hundred in the pool to choose from. I also noticed with some interest that often the most skilled commanders were not the highest ranking, so this meant making sure I had the right rank to command the size of the army I had without sacrificing too much skill. A fun exercise but once it was over I probably wouldn't have to worry about it for a bit.

Secondly I was having problems with my industrial output. In HoI every province you control has an 'industry' value assigned to it. Add all of these together and you get your industrial output. This value needs to be split into four different areas; consumer goods, war supplies for your armies, research and development of new technologies and finally the 'force pool' which determines how many military units you can build at any one time. I was running in the red for two of the four areas, and no matter how I tweaked the sliders I couldn't make them all happy. I clearly needed more industries, lucky for me that every province detail menu I had seen up to that point had a "build more industries" button. That would solve the problem! So I started in Moscow and wheeled around the country, finding provinces with good production and building more industries. What I didn't know at the time was that the local industries in those provinces stopped making things for the mother country and started building up their own industrial capacity. Naturally this was what I wanted, but it only made the budget shortfalls worse in the short term. Not that I noticed at the time.

Summer, 1937-- I smashed the remaining Latvians, annexed Estonia without incident, and took the majority of Lithuania. Losses were minimal and I was feeling like a regular socialist dictator. Nothing to it. Sometime near the end of August I think I got a lengthy message box covering the map screen entitled "The Great Officer Purge". The text explained that starting around that point, Stalin began to notice that Trotskites were starting to gather and plot his downfall from within the military. In response Stalin assassinated them all with impunity, like a thousand of these guys. Great indeed, I thought wryly. It was also mentioned that this draconian killing spree was often thought to have lost Stalin some of the best and brightest in his officer corps, and was at least partially responsible for the terrible losses the USSR would face later on in the war. I was being given the choice to purge or not to purge. If I acted with mercy, I would only gain a 10% measure in my 'dissent' stat. Not a bad offer, save a thousand gifted men and the USSR for some abstract percentage. I deviated from Joe and decided to let them live, those scrappy officers!

Just as I pardoned the League of Stalin Haters, I got a bevvy of messages explaining that a wing of tactical bombers I had on order would be delayed until late next year for lack of industrial output. I decided that this was probably linked to the sudden increase in dissent, as I knew that the higher dissent was in the country, the less the people produced. What was my dissent currently at anyway? 51% That didn't look very good.

A quick look at the Industrial Output panel told me that my entire government was in gridlock. Every sector of the USSR was moving not at all or was just barely getting by. To top it all of the lack of consumer goods was driving dissent ever higher. My industrial output was once near to 300 points and now was flirting with 150. If things got any worse, those officers might get their way with me. I abandoned all research and unit production, also put my armies on 'life-support' with just enough supplies to stay put and not bother anybody, and cranked up the consumer goods slider to about twice what was really needed for people to live. As thanks the Russian people decreased my dissent stat by 0.05 percent per day. The USSR was closed for WWII business unless you brought your war to us, at which point the dissent effect would cause my under-supplied soldiers to fight even more poorly than regular under-supplied soldiers. To be certain, I was lucky to not have any of the other dictators on the block notice. I wondered how long it would take to get the Russian people back on the side of Ol' Joe...

1938-- The USSR launches the "Porn and Candy bar" offensive against it's own people! Truckloads of candy, pornographic magazines, pulp novels, comic books, vodka and furry hats have been dispatched to every corner of the Motherland. One machinist in Moscow commented, "Socialism can't be all that bad. I mean, look at this awesome poster of Lenin I got from the government! So cool. Those nasty army officers were totally wrong."