Здравствуйте товарищи! - Greetings comrades! And welcome to a new Hearts of Iron 4 Dev Diary! I hope that you are all having a great summer, and that you are prepared for a little reading, because today we’ll be talking about the last country left to show for the upcoming expansion, a country that, in the direst of times, did take No Step Back.
As you all know, the Soviet Union is huge, and we’ve had to form our own Content Design Soviet to properly implement all the cool stuff we wanted to represent. So today I’ll be talking about my main responsibility, which has been the historical and the common branches for what is one of the most interesting countries in HOI.
I’d just like to mention a couple of things before we start:
First of all, yes, everything we’ll be talking about today will be coming for free with the Barbarossa update, although some content might vary if you don’t own some of the previous DLCs.
Secondly, our beloved Motherland is still WIP so you might see content, values or even art that’s not final and is subject to change before release. You will also see a fair amount of debug decisions that we use in order to test the new systems.
And with that said, I suggest you make yourselves comfortable and ready for a long read, and let’s get started!
This country entered World War I as the Russian Empire, but got out of it as Soviet Russia, having lost substantial territory in Eastern Europe as a result of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, where the Bolsheviks in Petrograd ceded control of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Finland and other areas to the Central Powers.
Since the Allies did not recognize the Bolshevik government, no Soviet Russian representation attended the Peace Conference of 1919 at Versailles, where the former Russian territories previously ceded to Germany became independent states.
In December 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed. The term soviet means “council”, and they emerged in the 1905 Revolution as groups or assemblies of Russian workers, soldiers and peasants, in opposition to the Tsar. These soviets disappeared after the (failed) revolution of 1905, but re-emerged under socialist leadership during the revolutions of 1917, which overthrew the Tsar.
Through the Soviets, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, constituted the political structure of the new regime.
Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Iosif Stalin came to power and soon began to suppress all political opposition inside the Party, starting with Trotsky and his followers, but turning against many of those who supported him in his political struggle shortly after (such as Zinovyev or Bukharin), developing a climate of political paranoia and carrying out the Great Purge, with its massive arrests and extremely harsh repression to citizens, military and even party members.
But that’s enough history for now, let’s take a look at how the Soviet Union looks when you start the game in 1936.
As you can see, a few things have changed:
Initial War Support has been significantly reduced, aiming at making it a bit harder to get to War Economy super early on, something that the Soviet Union was not really ready to do in 1936.
Stalin has finally got a trait (and as you’ll see, this is not the only trait he’ll be getting).
There are far more starting National Spirits than before, we will take a look at them later, but the first two of them you might recognize: Home of the Revolution and Trotskyite Plot?
We also have a starting advisor, Genrikh Yagoda. He is one of three possible Heads of the NKVD, each one with different characteristics, that you will not be able to manually remove/replace until you get rid of the purges (during which, Yagoda might get purged and be replaced by Yezhov, who can in turn get purged and be replaced by Beriya, as happened historically).
The advisor roster has been greatly expanded, these are the advisors available to Stalin in the early stages (unless he goes too wild with the purges).
There is an even longer list of advisors available for the alt-history communists, most of them will be targeted during the purges, but those are for the next dev diary!
There have also been some changes to the Generals roster: You will now start the game with the five first Marshals of the Soviet Union. Kulik has been demoted to General (since he was made marshal only in 1940, after having lost 3 of the previous marshals in the purges), and there is a new cavalry-specialized general, Vitaly Primakov, available at game start, although a potential target in the purges (generic portraits mean WIP portraits!).
Last but not least, we have sent several Soviet generals on leave to a rejuvenation center, as some had portraits from long after the war. But as you can see, they have not yet returned from their trip (traveling up to 30 years back in time might take some... time, after all).
Okay, we are now finally ready to take a proper look at the new Soviet focus tree (well, except for the Alt-history branches, those are for the next week).
Kinda wide and populated, yes? Well, our main goal with this rework was to offer a more flavorful and historically-accurate experience, while presenting the player with an ample variety of options (both historical and not-so-historical-but-still-plausible) to go for in every different area, just as the largest country in the world deserves!
In terms of gameplay, there are lots of short focuses in this tree, however you will never be able to complete all the focuses in all branches (unless you play until very, very late in-game). You will have to choose your strategy and pick the focuses and branches that will be key for your success in the campaign.
Let’s start talking about the industrial branch.
During the first years of Soviet rule, the economic and industrial development basically consisted of recovering the formerly rural-agricultural Russian economy from the devastation of the Civil War. From 1921 to 1928, the USSR pursued the New Economic Policy (replacing the policy of War Communism, which had led to the decline of the national economy). During the time of the NEP parts of the means of production (light industry, food industry, etc.) was largely in private hands, while the state controlled the heavy industry, transport, banks and international trade.
However, during the Stalinist era, the primary goal was the establishment of an industrial base in the country, and during the late 1920s measures were taken again against the kulaks, initiating the collapse of the NEP. In 1928 the implementation of the First Five Year Plan began, followed by a forced industrialization and collectivization.
As you might guess, the main feature of the Soviet industrial branch is the Five Year Plans:
You start with a National Spirit representing the Second Five Year Plan (1933-1937), this plan was characterized by a harsh collectivization and a major advance in industrialization and infrastructure. However, the hectic pace of this industrialization and the lack of qualified personnel often resulted in high accident rates (meaning frequent losses in lives and expensive material) and, overall, low efficiency.
As you complete focuses on the Five Year Plan branch, your National Spirit will evolve, representing the Third Five Year Plan (1938-”1942”, the plan was of course ruined in 1941 after Barbarossa). This plan initially emphasized the need of increasing quality in production and resource extraction. However, with tensions in Europe growing at an alarming rate, the plan soon started to gradually focus on defense and military production.
This is represented in game by the possibility of specializing your Third Five Year Plan, you can focus on increasing the efficiency of your factories in the long term, or you can shift the focus to start boosting armament production as soon as possible. As you might have noticed, the focuses in the centre are all resource-related.
As I’ve mentioned, the Third Five Year Plan was ruined after Barbarossa, so how is that represented in HOI?
Well, all the focuses related to the Third Five Year Plan (the ones inside the red boxes below) will get locked forever once the Soviet Union gets dragged into a war against a major country, meaning that once the Great Patriotic War starts, the Third Five Year Plan goes to hell, forever. You will keep your current national spirit with all its bonuses, but you won’t be able to progress any further in this part of the branch.
But fear not, that’s not the end of the Five Year Plans. If you manage to survive and defeat your enemies, and right after the peace conference against the enemy that ruined your five year plan, Restoration and Development will be automatically completed for you, not only granting temporary bonuses for repairing and rebuilding your (potentially) devastated industry and infrastructure, with a cost in consumer goods, but also unlocking access to the Fourth Five Year Plan and the final focuses in the industrial branch. The Fourth Five Year Plan (1946-1950) was focused around the reconstruction and economic development of the country.
The focuses below the Fourth Five Year Plan are late-game focuses aiming to provide interesting things to do and goals to achieve if you decide to continue playing after the main war (or if you manage to have an independent war against another major while world war 2 is raging elsewhere).
The COMECON was an economic organization, founded in 1949 by countries from the Eastern Bloc, and led by the Soviet Union. Once you complete the focus Found the COMECON (presumably earlier than 1949), a small decision system will be unlocked, aimed at aiding your allies (usually at your expense) in order to boost their military and industry so that they keep the pace in the potential wars to come.
To the right of the Five Year Plan focuses, we have a choice to make: train National Specialists or rely on Foreign Experts. The first will significantly improve the national designers, which are now slightly weaker at game start. The latter will unlock the Gosproyektstroy.
The Gosproyektstroy was a State Design and Construction Bureau set up in 1930 following an agreement with the "Architect of Detroit" (Albert Kahn), by which American architects became consultors for all industrial construction in the Soviet Union in the early 30s. This is one of many cases in which the USSR concluded agreements with foreign companies, mainly American (Ford, General Electric...) and German (Krupp, Borsig...) to carry out industrialization during the years of the first five-year plan.
In HOI, you can bring back the project, represented by a construction designer that will provide no research bonus (you’re relying on foreigners, after all) but that can, however, be improved by bringing foreign experts, boosting your production in the long term. Each country will grant different bonuses, Germany will give a bonus to efficiency growth, the USA will grant an efficiency cap bonus and Japan will boost your starting efficiency, for example. All of them will also grant a License Production Cost bonus (atm it’s shown as that amazing “None: +0.75” in the pic below :D).
The Russian Academy of Sciences, founded in the 1700s, became the highest scientific institution in the Soviet Union after the revolution. National academies appeared throughout the 20th century in the Union republics, and regional branches were created as part of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
The first focus (The USSR Academy of Sciences) will grant you a research slot and a small bonus (1%) to research speed.The second focus will allow you to build more academies of sciences in the Soviet republics, both in integrated (not-released) republics and in puppeted republics, for an extra 1% research speed each and, if built on a puppeted republic, then it will also boost your puppet’s research, now that’s a win-win if I’ve ever seen one.
Moving on to the Airforce branch.
During the 1930s, the Soviet government funded missions to break numerous world aviation records. Aviation achievements and records became demonstrations of the USSR's technological progress and Soviet media continuously exalted record-breaking pilots.
However, Soviet aviation was far from being in as good a shape as the Soviet media seemed to indicate. It was, in fact, plagued by mismanagement, inefficiency and technologically-deficient equipment, leading to a staggeringly high accident rate (in early 1941, prior to the war, apparently 2-3 planes on average were lost daily due to accidents, which led to the famous “flying coffin” incident, which sealed Pavel Rychagov’s fate during the Great Purge).
The Great Purge definitely took its toll on the Soviet Air Force too, newly promoted officers lacked flying and command experience, while older commanders, having witnessed the fate of so many officers during the purges, lacked initiative and efficiency out of fear of being labeled as enemies of the people.
In HOI, this terrible situation is represented via the National Spirit Soviet Airforce, which has fairly harsh and frightening penalties to anything related to getting your feet off the ground.
Throughout the Airforce branch, you will be able to fix most of these penalties and get some bonuses too. You will not be able to remove all of those penalties though, since you will eventually have to choose between production or pilot training: the left part of the branch aims at improving aircraft production (more plains, better plains), while the right is focused on getting skilled aviators from among flying clubs, and training men and women alike to become competent army pilots, culminating with the three all-female aviation regiments formed by Marina Raskova (they come with aces and everything!).
And it’s time to talk about the Soviet Navy!
The Soviet Navy was divided between four operational zones: The Baltic Fleet, the Black Sea Fleet, the Arctic Fleet and the Far East Fleet, with vast distances separating them.
By 1941 the Red Fleet possessed few large modern warships, its expansion had focused instead on submarines and light ships, aiming at protecting the country’s coasts and borders from enemy attacks, the naval defense strategy. After the purges (in which many of the advocates of the defense strategy perished), Stalin pushed to turn the maritime strategy into a resolutely offensive one, but the construction of large military vessels was hindered by the war.
Anyways, when Operation Barbarossa commenced, German bombers focused on airfields instead of targeting naval bases. The Third Reich didn’t need to destroy the Soviet navy, as long as their navy managed to blockade Soviet ships in their ports with mines.
In the left part of the tree, you will be able to reinforce the naval bases of any of the four fleets.
You can then Expand Shipbuilding Plants to get a significant amount of dockyards, based on the naval bases you previously reinforced.
To the right, the PC of the USSR Navy will grant you The Red Fleet national spirit.
This national spirit will be further improved in the focuses below, based on your choice between surface or submarine warfare. Most of them will provide some navy experience, tech research bonus and production cost reduction for the appropriate type of ship.
Long Range Raiders will also unlock Cruiser Submarines tech and add a couple of K-Class submarines to your production line.
Similarly, Expand the Morskaya Aviatsiya will grant you bonuses for carriers and navy aircraft, while also adding a carrier to your production line.
And we’ve made it to the last actual common branch, the Military branch!
There are three branches here really, one for Military Industry, one for Defense, and one for the Army. Let’s start with the Military Industry, to the left.
Here you will find multiple research and production bonuses, some military factories and some tank templates.
Development of Tankograd will make it cheaper for you to edit tank templates, while also building military factories in heavily industrialized states in the Urals and to the East.
Last but not least, let’s talk about Merge Tank and Materiel Plants. Did you notice that there were similar focuses in the Air and Navy branches?
Well, during my research for Soviet designers, I was amazed by the sheer complexity of just keeping track of a single designer candidate during HOI’s timeline, since many plants were repeatedly renamed (or re-designated), merged or split into different bureaus (which were also frequently renamed, merged and split themselves). Sometimes plants or entire bureaus were merged into even bigger agencies, and other times a plant would just be merged into a nearby, bigger plant to focus on the R&D aspects of it, for example.
Last but not least, we have the evacuation of entire plants from West to East carried out by the Soviets shortly before Barbarossa and of course during the war, which often resulted in more merging, renaming, and repurposing of plants.
So, in the face of all this industry reassignment frenzy and plant renaming festival I thought: why not just embrace this chaos and make something out of it for HOI?
These focuses will unlock decisions to merge different plants into your active designers, providing them with many different small bonuses. All these plants are real, although not all of them were actually merged into a bureau or into another plant.
Worth noting that there are also a few new Naval and Tank designers available for the Soviet Union.
In the Defense Branch you can choose between building a defensive line in the border with Poland (Stalin Line) or in the border with Germany, assuming you have somehow gained control over Eastern Poland (Molotov Line). You can also fortify Moscow and the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the border with Japan and their minions. Impregnable Forts is meant to represent the fearsome coastal batteries around Leningrad and in the Crimea, that caused so much trouble to the Germans during the invasion.
Further down the tree, we have Leningrad Polytechnical Institute, which will grant you your 5th research slot, The Road of life and the Soviet Atomic Bomb Project.
The Road of Life were the transport routes across Lake Ladoga (water routes during the period in which the lake is navigable and ice routes in winter) to Leningrad during the Second World War. They were the only Soviet surface routes into the city while it was besieged by the Germans (if you want to know more about the Road of Life, I can recommend watching a fantastic episode centered about the siege of Leningrad, as part of the documentary “Soviet Storm - WW2 in the East”. I find the whole documentary very interesting and enjoyable, by the way).
In-game, this focus represents the desperate yet brave and daring supply methods used by the Soviets in the direst of times. It will become available as soon as one of the key Soviet cities is threatened by enemy troops, and it will provide some bonuses to winter attrition and supply.
The Soviet Atomic Bomb Project was the military project, part of the Soviet atomic program for nuclear research and development, aimed at developing nuclear weapons during the war. It was greatly stimulated by the activities and achievements of scientific institutions and military industry of foreign powers such as the German Reich and the United States of America.
Initial efforts were hampered by the German invasion and remained largely reliant on the intelligence knowledge gained from the Soviet spy rings working in the USA's Manhattan Project.
The focus requires having built at least 7 Academies of Sciences, and it will provide an array of bonuses and tools to infiltrate enemy atomic programs and develop your very own nuclear bombs, including an extra operative slot and a new historical operative.
Now let’s talk about the army branch.
The Army Branch is one of the most important ones in the tree, and it has a lot of content related to it, so let’s focus on the key aspects of it, starting with the initial National Spirits.
The Military was highly politicized, making it dangerously inefficient, even though political discussions (and indoctrination) among the troops also had its benefits for the Party. Politicized Military can be improved further down the branch.
As you can see below, The Red Army has a lot of red modifiers, how fitting, right?
Well, no worries, most of the focuses in this branch will deal with those red modifiers, gradually putting your unreliable army in very good shape.
Once you Strengthen the Mobilization Plan for some manpower and mobilization speed, you will be faced with a decision to make: Restore Cossack Units or opt for Cohesion First.
After the Russian Civil War, Cossack troops were disbanded, since many of them sided with the white movement. However, in 1936, the restrictions on conscription of Cossacks for the Red Army were lifted and some cavalry divisions received the status of Cossack Divisions. The wearing of the previously prohibited Cossack uniform was also restored (although it would only last for a few years), and in this uniform walked the Cossack units in their first military parade as part of the Red Army in 1937, and later on at the Victory Parade on June 24, 1945.
In-game, Restore Cossack Units will grant you small bonuses to cavalry, a new general and a few divisions, including a new Cossack cavalry template. To be fair, this template is inspired by the composition of cavalry divisions (not necessarily Cossacks) later on, around 1941, but I really wanted to offer the player an interesting cavalry template from which to work on.
Cohesion First will instead boost your division organization, in exchange for some extra training time.
The old Rehabilitated Military and Military Reorganization have suffered some changes. Rehabilitated military will be available once you get rid of Stalin’s Paranoia and the purges (more of this later), and will help you recover some valuable organization.
Military Reorganization has now become an actual reorganization, during which you will have to deal with some nasty penalties that will be applied when you start the focus. However, once the focus is completed, not only will you get rid of said penalties, but your national spirit The Red Army will also get useful bonuses to modifying division templates.
Similarly, Desperate Measures and Lessons of War have also suffered significant changes.
Desperate Measures can only be taken while at war against a major power, and will grant a temporary boost to fielding divisions, as well as a set of decisions to help you contain the enemy invasion.
Lessons of War can only be taken once the national spirit granted by Desperate Measures is gone, representing how, even though the Soviet Union suffered numerous and devastating defeats and military failures during the first years of the war, those fatalities were acknowledged and the military slowly learned their lessons from them.
This focus is probably the turning point in which the Red Army leaves behind the terrible state in which it was at the start of the game, to begin the path towards becoming a formidable military force. The focus will not only add key bonuses to The Red Army national spirit, but it will also unlock the famous Order 227 (“No Step Back”), which will, in turn, unlock decisions to prepare and carry out important Military Offensives.
In your struggle against the enemies of the people, you will also be able to raise Penal Battalions in the form of divisions entirely composed of convicts. Penal battalions might not be as well-equipped as regular infantry, but they are definitely easier to replenish and overall can perform very good as cheap meatshields, as long as you don’t care too much about your manpower (something that is probably not the biggest issue in the Soviet Union).
Partisan activity in occupied Soviet territory (especially Ukraine and Belarus) was impressively high and played a role perhaps not very decisive but definitely important to the overall war effort. Organization of the Partisans will give you a set of tools to increase partisan activity, disrupt enemy supply and hinder enemy offensives, including a related historical operative and an extra operative slot for him. It will also come with a couple of partisan Generals that can prove to be very useful.
Once you have carried out the military reorganization and learned your lessons of war, you may choose what to do with your Political Commissars:
Keep Commissars Organization means that political commissars will continue playing the role of “second commander” within the military units.
You can instead Swap to Political Advisors, and try to increase efficiency by subordinating political officers to commanding officers, allowing for more freedom in the military command chain while the new role of political advisor focuses more on morale-related functions.
The Glory of the Red Army will make it easier for you to unlock those last doctrines remaining and field more special forces divisions. It will also unlock a Soviet-specific improved version of the Blitz Tactic, as well as a new General: I read a lot about General Rybalko in various different sources during my research, and I feel that he deserves a place in the Soviet Generals roster.
Now, let’s skip the political branch for a moment and jump to the Internal Affairs branch, a common branch for the communist paths.
