Managing Production in Hearts of Iron III

There is a lot to sink our teeth into here, so let's start at the top left frame and work down. In the orange square (see screenshot) we have buttons to open menus to build land, air, and sea divisions. The three buttons beneath them, respectively: open menus to buy individual brigades, or air and navy bases. These allow you to command air and sea forces, which can only be operated within a certain range from their base. The seven buttons below access the building of non-traditional weapons, industry, convoys, and so on.

The yellow square is the main building queue, and below that, in the green square, are requests coming in from theatre commanders. We will describe these further later. For now, lets look at the right half of the window.

Starting at the top of the right half and working down, the column on the left (in the blue rectangle) shows our resources, supplies, money, fuel and their daily rates of change. The Nukes will stay at zero until you are pretty far along Hearts of Iron III’s massive tech tree.

In the top right of the frame (purple rectangle), just under where you can turn the AI on and off, are the oh so very important sliders discussed in detail below. The window panes at the bottom right (in a delightful pink, yup I’m running out of colours) have information about your trade routes and, below this, your convoys. Each of these is probably worth at least one article on their own, so for the purposes of this production guide we’ll let the Diplomacy and Convoy AI’s do their thing.

Before we buy anything, lets check on our IC. We divvy it up with the five sliders. Upgrades gets newly researched tech to troops in the field. Reinforcement is used up by troops as they return to full strength over time. Supplies represents how many supplies you make for your troops domestically: these are stockpiled and can be bought and sold through diplomacy. Production is how much you are putting into the new projects in the large window on the left. Consumer Goods is the industrial production needed to keep dishes clean on the home front. Clicking the need button automatically sets the slider to that number.

The relationship between production and time of completion is important. The units in the production queue on the left have percentages which indicate the speed at which they are being built, which is a function of how much production each unit gets. The unit at the top of the queue is filled to 100% before production goes to the next unit. Green units are being built as fast as they can, yellow is underway, but not as fast as possible, and red means no work is underway.

That means that adding production won’t speed up the arrival of a unit that is already at 100%, and taking it away will nip its way up from the bottom of the list, first slowing those units, then the ones at the top.

You can either look around your forces, which we discuss in the next article, and decide what to build on your own, or there is a sort of semi-AI at work you can use. Theatre commanders will request more units, which show up at the bottom of the screen. Here we see that Command and Control for North Eastern France would please like 22 brigades of armour. Yeah… ya should’ve though of that before the Germans did. Marseille Head Quarters wanted three bomber wings and an armour brigade. Ok that we

can do.

Clicking the build button next to those requests will add them to the queue. We can see there are now an armour division and three bomber groups below the destroyer flotilla and battleship we were already working on when the Campaign started. There are two other things to notice. These units will automatically be deployed to the Marseilles HQ, which requested them, and our production need number shot up.

That is because the production need number is based on your entire production queue, and meeting the need would mean producing everything as fast as possible. Having extra items in the queue means that as economic factors change, you can just send any excess to production and not be wasting it.