As the world seems to be heading towards World War 3 we’d thought we pick a suitable area of discussion for today, so welcome to the sixth development diary for East vs West: A Hearts of Iron game.Today’s topic: Forces and the Order of Battle, or, as we call them, OOBs. Even though the term OOBs represents more than just the setup of armed forces at a certain point in history, today we will focus particularly on the land units you’ll have available.East vs West has six scenarios, or main starting points:Cold War Begins 1946,Arab-Israeli War 1948,Korean War 1950,Vietnam War 1961,Afghanistan War 1979Gulf War 1991Each scenario is handpicked for its particular historical significance for the Cold War era and as the driving force for the main stories of the game. Think of them as platforms, or a starting point where you can jump into the midst of one of the major crises of the era. To capture each scenario properly, we have carefully set nations’ OOBs in a way that we felt would respect historical realism. Each nation is set up on a country by country basis and we've gone to elaborate step to copy their armed forces. That means that we’ve included forces like the Army of the Holy War for Palestine or forces that would otherwise have not necessarily been seen in a game of this genre. Regardless of size of the country, be it Palestine, the USSR or the forces of Saddam in Iraq, our aim is to make sure the forces in the game resemble their historical equivalents in size and quality.In 1979, India has 1,3 million men arranged in 382 brigades, while Pakistan across the border has 500,000 men. Does that seem unfair? No worries, you can do something about it! Such numbers would lead anyone to believe that we're on the brink of total war and that was the case with India and Pakistan on three occasions during the timeline. However, the Cold War was actually a long period of relative peace in the world, especially if you look at major wars between countries. The numbers I cited were the total size of a certain branch of a country's armed forces. In truth, only 62% of India's 1.3 million men, or 233 brigades, are in active service; the remaining 149 brigades’ worth of equipment is in the reserve pool. These are the sorts of distinctions that we make in order to prevent East vs West from simply being a fantasy wargame.In all line of work it’s important to bring the right equipment. This certainly holds true for the military as well. We have introduced Equipment as a value for units visible as the orange bar. Each unit with vehicles or other types of heavier equipment has a factor representing its unit softness/hardness. This means that an armored brigade will have more Equipment then an infantry brigade and also a higher hardness. To defeat a unit with high hardness you will need to build counter units with high hard attack so as to deliver Equipment damage before dealing serious manpower (visible in blue in the same bar) damage otherwise the soldiers can still be shielded in their tanks or armored vehicles.In effect, we made combat realistic in that before starting to kill off the manpower in any sizeable number of armored units you will have to destroy its equipment first. First the tanks, then the men. Or, both at once with the right equipment. Reinforcement of soldiers costs manpower taken from your population while repair of equipment costs money in one way or another.I’m no army general, so how do I get realistic and balanced divisions so the AI doesn’t murder me horribly, wouldn’t it be complicated? Don’t worry.As you’ve seen, we have color coded all land units and split them up into main body units (seen with green counters) and support units (seen with brown counters). The main body units are the backbone of any army and made up of units like infantry brigades or mechanized brigades. These give you a positive width. Support units, on the other hand, give you negative width and, combining the two together, the player can build divisions only as long as the sum of all brigades in a division is positive. This depends, of course, on each main body unit’s ability to provide protection to certain support units. For example, militia has an almost nonexistent ability to sustain support brigades while a heavy mechanized brigade has a good ability. That means that from now on the divisional units you will construct and the units you will face will all have an unprecedented realism and balance at the same time as they are intuitive and easy to match up.This game is just not the prelude to the Second World War, where you only want to build up your forces. You are now actively interested in downsizing your vast army now that the war has ended, or gaining that peace dividend once you’ve quelled troubles in your own neighborhood. You can send the boys back home to their families and to their jobs, yet it would be folly to envision that nations would throw out their precious equipment. To model this, we have introduced a proper reserve and real time mobilization.In-game this means that you can now transfer units into a reserve pool where the unit disappears from the map, but its equipment is placed in the reserve pool. The manpower is freed for other uses, like factory, farm labor or a job in the service industry. You don't have to pay for full-time standing army maintenance and you have the ability to recall motorized divisions back to active duty when needed. Of course, it takes time for such units to reorganize themselves.You mobilize units by simply placing them back on the map. So if you are facing an imminent threat, you might want to judge how small of an army reserve force you want to keep and risk the enemy overrunning your defenses before you manage to mobilize your reserves.As for the map in case you do have to wage war (since knowledge of your battlefield is the ultimate weapon – besides H-bombs) we’ve made one more important and shall we say “land breaking” change dealing with terrain effects in battle. We have heavily modified how the terrain bonuses are given and set them all intuitively in one place. If you want to know how a unit will perform in wooded or mountainous terrain, we figure you should just ask the unit.By clicking on the unit you will see the stats it has and no longer will you need to check the terrain or anywhere else how a specific unit will perform in a particular type of terrain.So if the dreadful day comes and the Cold War goes hot, remember the words of John F. Kennedy – “It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war”.Davide Benedetti (Unit OOB)Gellert Keresztes (Game design and Head of Softcoding)Lennart Berg (Game design)Ian Calderbank (Terrain rework)Grega Trobec (GUI gfx)Ruud van Putten (GUI coding)Jorge Martins (GUI coding)Jamie Li (GUI coding)Gabor Gombor (hardcoding)Konrad Zuwała (hardcoding)Piotr Banasiak (hardcoding)