00:09For the Motherland is the second expansion of Paradox Interactive's World War II grand strategy game, Hearts of Iron 3.
00:16This expansion is going to focus in on making the game feel more historical and add more flavor to give
00:24you a deeper World War II experience.
00:26For the Motherland is obviously a reference to the Soviet Union and the Eastern Front.
00:32One of the parts of the game that's, should we say, not done as well as it could be done
00:37is the partisan warfare that was seen a lot on the Eastern Front.
00:41So one of the things we're going to add in to For the Motherland is a new partisan warfare system
00:45where you build your own partisan units,
00:48parachute them behind enemy lines and move them around to sabotage supply lines and things like this.
00:54This A adds a new dimension to warfare on the Eastern Front, making the Soviet Union more historical to play,
01:01but also adds fun to the governments in exile where once France falls, you can start building up the French
01:07resistance in preparation to assisting the liberation of France.
01:10One of the things our fans have always asked for is multi-core support.
01:14So now we're going to multi-thread the AI in For the Motherland.
01:19Now I know everyone will love exact performance numbers of how much faster the game is going to go,
01:24but while we're also going to make the AI run faster, we're also going to look at improving the AI
01:29and adding more functionality to it.
01:31So some of the improvements, I'm afraid, are going to end up being eaten up by giving you a better
01:35AI.
01:36So what we're going to promise you is a faster game, well, at least a bit faster game, and a
01:41better AI.
01:42For diplomacy and politics, we've added two important features.
01:47The first one is the ability for you to finance or push for a coup of another government.
01:54This captures things like the anti-nazi coup in Belgrade that the British sponsored in early 1941,
02:01and we will now be able to do the same thing in For the Motherland.
02:05For diplomacy, in Hearthstone 3 we have a triangle, which shows you how you feel towards the three great factions
02:11of the era.
02:13And it captures a lot of things very nicely.
02:16Where the problems with the system begin is countries like Finland,
02:19who are also democracies, also quite like the Allies,
02:22but want to recover lost Finnish territory from the Soviet Union.
02:27And under a current system we can't quite get the dynamic of Finland properly.
02:30So now we're going to add a new system of war goals, which we're going to lift from Victoria.
02:36And Finland, at any time, regardless of what it thinks about the Axis,
02:40can go to Germany and say,
02:41I want to recover Karelia from the Soviet Union.
02:45And if Germany says yes, Finland will move into the Axis camp
02:49and be ready to join the war, but won't until Germany attacks the Soviet Union,
02:56making diplomacy more historical.
02:59Countries that wanted to recover territory will naturally join the Axis and fight to restore their national honour.
03:06The theatre system in Hearts of Iron 3E is one of these features that people really love.
03:11This ability to, you know, hand control over a part of the war to the AI,
03:15allowing you to focus in on what's important to you.
03:18But obviously, with anything, we always seek to improve.
03:23So what we're going to do is we're going to create a new theatre interface,
03:26which is going to provide you with long-term strategic requirements that you want,
03:32allowing you to plan your building better to get more out of your theatres.
03:37We're going to add an additional theatre, your strategic reserve,
03:41where you can, like, when you build divisions,
03:44you can just put them into that theatre and they'll be ready.
03:47So when a theatre says, I need five new infantry divisions,
03:51you can just press a button and they'll be withdrawn from the strategic reserve
03:55and given to the theatre straight away.
03:57This will make the theatres easier to use,
04:00make the information you get from them more useful
04:02and will also allow you to have more confidence in using these theatres
04:08because they should perform a lot better.
04:10One of the fun things about being a game designer
04:12is you can pick features that matter to you and are very personal
04:16and maybe not huge in the grand scheme of things.
04:21And one of the features is the undeclared war.
04:24My grandfather served in World War II on destroyers
04:29and was actually on the Arctic convoys and the Atlantic convoys
04:33for a large period of the war.
04:36By the middle of 1941, Britain had lost a lot of naval units
04:42and at the same time Japan was starting to get frisky in the Pacific
04:48so Britain needed to withdraw fleet units to the Far East
04:52as well as fight convoys and fight Italy
04:56so the Royal Navy was seriously overstretched.
05:01Roosevelt decided that this would not do
05:04and launched what became known as the undeclared war.
05:09From the middle of 1941,
05:11the United States fleet began to fight World War II.
05:15The first US combat casualties of World War II
05:18in September 1941
05:19when a US destroyer was torpedoed by a German U-boat.
05:24And it's one of these nice little features
05:26that with my grandfather being there,
05:30US participation may well have actually saved his life.
05:34so I thought, I want this in.
05:37So step one is we're going to remodel the resource system
05:42to remove resources from Britain and give them to America.
05:46So now the convoys will now run from America to Britain
05:49moving the U-boat war to the North Atlantic
05:52where in all the incarnations of Hearts of Iron so far
05:55we just couldn't quite get it there.
05:58Then we're going to put the US with deep in debt
06:01as a legacy of the Great Depression
06:03so it will want to sell resources to Britain
06:06to pay for its own mobilisation.
06:10And this way we'll create the North Atlantic convoy war
06:15and then we're going to add special decisions to the US
06:18which will allow it to move its fleet units and air units
06:21into the Atlantic Ocean
06:23and begin to fight Germany
06:25even though it's not yet at war.
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