HEARTS OF IRON DOOMSDAY Paradox Interactive President and CEO: Theodore Bergqvist Producer: Johan Andersson Director of Publishing: Fredrik W. Lindgren CFO: Lena Eriksson Programming: Pontus Åberg, Stefan Johansson Artist: Dick Sjöström Art Director: Stefan Thulin AI Scripting: David Martinez Campaign Design: Simon Aistleitner Marketing and PR Director: Susana Meza Product Manager: Jeanette Bauer Quality Assurance: Florian Santer Manual: Chris Stone Editing: Ryan Newman, Nick Stewart Original Music: Andreas Waldetoft Sound Effects: Wave Generation Market coordination USA: Reena Miranda, Karen Sosa Germany, Austria and Switzerland: Mario Gerhold, Susanna Mittermaier, Ute Palmer UK: Stuart Chiplin, Dean Punter, Holly Groves, Debbie Brettel PR UK: Simon Callaghan Italy: Marco Viciani, Daniele Falcone Scandinavia: Niklas Molin, Lennart Blixt Thanks to our partners Atari (USA), Snowball (Russia), Friendware (Spain), Cenega (Poland) and Koch Media (UK, Germany, Italy). Special thanks to all our forum members, partners and supporters, who are integral for our success. HEARTS OF IRON DOOMSDAY Introduction Hearts of Iron II - Doomsday is a stand-alone expansion to Paradox Entertainment's award-winning Hearts of Iron II, a game where you will guide your nation to glorious victory or ignominious defeat in the World War II era, and as a result of this expansion, through a subsequent hypothetical "Doomsday" conflict between the emerging post-war super-powers. With several Grand Campaigns, numerous Battle Scenarios, multiplayer capability, and your choice of the more than 70 playable countries that spanned the globe at the time, Hearts of Iron II- Doomsday will give you countless hours of challenge and entertainment. This is a highly complex grand strategy game, not a historical simulation or FPS. With HoI2's nearly limitless options and exceptional depth comes a comparable learning curve. It may take some time to become familiar with its richness and its multitude of controls, so don't be surprised if your first few campaigns end in disaster. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to play HoI2, and no sure way to win. You'll probably find that the lessons you learn in your early defeats will be just as valuable as any that you later gain through victory. Use those experiences and don't be afraid to experiment or save the game and then try a variety of alternatives. While this manual will familiarise you with most of the ins and outs of Hearts of Iron II, the most valuable resource of all are the Paradox public forums (www.paradoxplaza.com/forums). There, you can usually find the answer to any question you might have about the game in a matter of hours, if not minutes. It's also a place where tips and strategies are exchanged, where people from around the world will arrange multiplayer games, where you can read about others' HoI2 experiences or post your own, and where new battle scenarios and user game modifications will often be developed. This is also where you'll find Paradox's latest post-release enhancements available for download as well as a large number of FAQs and other resources. Installation System Requirements To play Hearts of Iron II- Doomsday your system must meet the following requirements: / Pentium III 450MHz (800MHz or better recommended) / Windows® 98/ME/2000/XP / 128Mb RAM (512Mb or more is highly recommended) / 900Mb free hard drive space / 4Mb Video Card DirectX compatible (8Mb or more recommended) / DirectX compatible sound card / DirectX9.0 or higher (included on the CD). Installation Procedure Place the Hearts of Iron II- Doomsday CD in your CD-ROM drive. If you have AutoPlay enabled on this drive, the installation screen will appear automatically. If the AutoPlay doesn't start - or is disabled for this drive - then click Start>Run and then type X:\Setup.exe to launch the installation program (replace "X" with the drive designation for the CD-ROM in which you placed the Hearts of Iron II CD, which is usually D or E on most systems). Simply follow the on-screen prompts to install the game. Keeping Up To Date Paradox is deeply committed to its customers, and in my experience, their product support is almost unparalleled in the gaming industry. The developers read and frequently participate in the discussions on the public forums and will often implement some of the best player-requested features or enhancements post-release. They also make minor tweaks or alterations to existing features and squish the occasional bug that had previously escaped detection. You can go directly to the downloads page at www.paradoxplaza.com/downloads. asp under the HoI2 - Doomsday heading or visit the thriving community at www.paradoxplaza.com under the HoI2 heading. HEARTS OF IRON DOOMSDAY Getting Started Launching the Game Click Start>Program Files>Paradox Entertainment>Hearts of Iron 2>HoI2 to launch Hearts of Iron II's opening movie. Like most Paradox titles, HoI2 tends to launch a little more slowly than some games because Paradox leaves a large number of files in simple text format to make them easily modifiable by users who might want to tweak unit values, write their own events, or even construct new battle scenarios on their own. This gives the game immense flexibility, but it also means that those files must be compiled when the game loads. For Beginning Players If you're new to Hearts of Iron and Paradox games, I would recommend that you begin by reading the next section - Key Concepts - and then work your way through the game's tutorials. These will introduce you to the most important parts of the interface and get you up and running fairly quickly, though they focus mostly on "how" to do something, not "why". Once you're more comfortable and have done a bit of your own experimentation, you'll probably want to come back to the other sections where you will find detailed descriptions of all the controls and some of the underlying strategies and tips. My best advice would be a mixture of "don't panic" and "be patient". HoI2 can seem a bit intimidating and complex at first, but once you've played it for a little while, you'll find that most of its aspects are quite intuitive. Remember that a full grand campaign game is quite lengthy and that if you rush headlong into battle without proper preparation, you're likely to be as successful as you would be if you were to try to do it in real life. If you can't find the answer to a question you have in this manual, don't forget that you can probably get one almost immediately on (yep, you guessed it) the Paradox public forums. For HoI2 Players...What's New? If you're a Hearts of Iron II vet, then you'll find that HoI2 - Doomsday is based on the same engine but with an extended timeline that now extends to 1953. New features include an expanded technology tree that allows construction of helicopter squads, escort carriers and tactical nuclear weapons; a whole new game element of spying and espionage; a hypothetical World War III campaign and several new or revised scenarios; a comprehensive scenario editor...and much, much, much, much, much more! Key Concepts As I said in the introduction, Hearts of Iron 2 is a game of considerable complexity. It is vital to understand that virtually every aspect of the game is interconnected. It can and will take time to learn how each of the game elements interacts with each other, and to gain a comfortable degree of control over the nation you are playing. The goal of this section is to give you a broad overview of HoI2's major components and key concepts before moving on to the subsequent sections that detail each feature and interface in turn. Fighting the Second World War - indeed, almost every war in history - was not purely a matter of pitting man against man on the field of battle, nor is HoI2 merely a large digital battlefield. Simply fielding a larger army than your enemy will not ensure victory, and neglecting your economy, the so-called "engine of war", can imperil your chances for survival. It is vital, then, to ensure that your nation has the necessary economic infrastructure and political wherewithal to stand against your enemies if attacked, or to support any aggressive moves you might wish to make. HEARTS OF IRON DOOMSDAY A huge army might appear invincible at first glance, but it can easily succumb to a seemingly weaker force that is equipped with more modern weapons, is in better supply, or is superbly trained and led. Elite forces can tip the balance in a conflict, as can employing a strategy that uses terrain or weather to your advantage. Your ability to coordinate every element of your armed forces against your enemy will also greatly increase your chances of winning. Armies may be held in reserve or can be used to support other actions; air forces may be used to soften up an enemy's defences, disrupt his troops' organisation, hamper his supply, or even gut his industry; and navies can actively patrol enemy waters to embargo the import of much-needed resources or even bombard and invade his shores. The Doomsday expansion has added a further wrinkle to the game: an active spying and espionage system that will allow a nation to engage in clandestine activities to weaken an enemy, steal its technological secrets, and to provide information about its force composition, capabilities and strengths. Ignore such subversive actions at your own peril! Victory The ultimate goal of Hearts of Iron II is to guide your nation to victory. For those who play a conventional game, there are a number of provinces located around the globe that have a victory point value, and there are the three main political factions: the Axis, the Allies, and the Comintern. Each campaign game has a predetermined end date, usually December 30th, 1953, and the victor is the faction which controls the highest point total worth of provinces when the scenario ends. The shorter battle scenarios may have somewhat different victory conditions, while the Doomsday campaign encompasses the post-war years and begins after the Axis defeat. Although this is the only measure of victory recognised by the game, you might wish to consider alternate "personal achievement" criteria if you choose to play a "doomed" nation, or a country that is not a member of one of the factions and remains aloof. If you are participating in a multiplayer game where it is likely that there will be more than one player on the victorious side, you may want to establish some "house rules" about victory. The choice is yours. The Engine of War While HoI2 is undeniably a game that focuses on war, it is not exclusively about war. Conflict is very costly and can involve immense expenditures in resources and lives before a victor is declared. The engine that propels a nation through war and ultimately leads to its success or failure is its capacity for industrial production, and it is frequently for economic or geopolitical reasons that wars are waged in the first place. Natural Resources If your economy is the engine that will propel you through war, then natural resources are the fuel that powers the engine. Although there were hundreds of resources that historically played key roles, HoI2 distils them into four distinct categories: energy sources, metals, oil, and rare materials. Energy, metal and rare materials are used on a daily basis by your factories to provide you with industrial capacity (see below), while oil is consumed by many of your armed forces (the navy, air force, and motorised parts of the army) in order to remain operational. Natural resources are either drawn from provinces that are under your nation's control, or are acquired via trade or direct cash purchases from other nations should you lack territories where they occur naturally. Any excesses you have may be stockpiled, sold or traded to other nations who are in need. If you lack any of these, then your economy and your military will grind to a halt, most likely dooming your nation to failure. HEARTS OF IRON DOOMSDAY Industrial Capacity To continue our analogy, industrial capacity (abbreviated throughout as "IC") is the engine that drives your nation's economy. This represents your overall ability to manufacture goods and is determined by the number of factories that you have operating in your nation. The more factories you have, the greater your potential industrial capacity. Your IC should be thought of as an ability and not as a thing. You can't store ICs in the way that can stockpile natural resources. You can only use them to manufacture products, up to your daily capacity limit. Factories require natural resources in order to operate. In HoI2, this is abstracted such that each factory withdraws energy, metal and rare materials from your stockpiles each day in order to run at full capacity and generate IC. If resources are plentiful, your factories will generate their full potential IC. If you run short of a necessary resource ...