Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Developer: Paradox Interactive
System requirements: Requires Hearts of Iron 3 and Semper Fi to play; Windows 2000/XP/Vista; Intel Pentium IV 2.4 GHz or AMD 3500+ (quad core); 2GB RAM; 2GB hard disk space; GeForce 8800 or ATI Radeon X1900 NVIDIA; Direct-X compatible sound card; 3-button mouse; keyboard and speakers; Internet Connection
Genre: Strategy
ESRB rating: Everyone 10+
Release date: Available now

Much like Michael Corleone in The Godfather III, I can’t escape WWII strategy games. No matter how much I try to get away, they keep pulling me back in. Paradox Interactive has released yet another expansion to Hearts of Iron 3. Adding even more content on top of the Semper Fi expansion, For the Motherland boasts a host of new mechanics, in addition to some specific battle scenarios that add some tactical flavor to the game. And, true to its roots, it remains an in-depth strategy game that has enough micro-management to keep any grognard occupied, while having enough automation options to streamline the parts you don’t like.

At the top of the list of new mechanics are strategic resources. While previous versions of HOI3 have always used 3 critical resources to support your industry (steel, energy, and rare materials), strategic resources are not used to fuel your industry as such. Instead, they are country or faction-wide modifiers that improve some aspect of your country’s performance. Some, like ball bearings, improve the rate at which units repair, while uranium will improve your speed of nuclear research. These strategic resources help the game improve the historical starting position of various countries to make them a bit more realistic. The vast port facilities of the British make naval actions easier for them, while the fur to be found in Finland might be coveted by the Axis powers in order to make a winter invasion of Russia a tad easier. Strategic resources are located in geographic locations, meaning that they can be both captured and, more importantly, strategically bombed. This allows players to mimic their historical counterparts and order attacks that parallel the Schweinfurt Raids.

The importance of these strategic materials feeds into the new aspects of espionage and diplomacy found in For the Motherland. Any country that joins a faction can utilize the strategic resources of its allies. That means if Finland joins the Axis, it can give fur to the other Axis powers, and receive the benefit of Germany’s ball bearings. However, strategic resources can also be “traded” among neutral powers. You cannot just buy strategic resources like you can regular resources, but any country that is closely aligned to a faction can supply the leader of the faction with its strategic resources without actually joining the war. So, for example, if the USA is closely aligned to the Allies, but has not joined the war yet, it can provide several strategic resources to the British while still remaining neutral. In terms of diplomacy, it is now to the advantage of all sides of the conflict to carefully choose who to invite into their faction, who to keep neutral and friendly, and who to keep away from other factions at all costs.

But diplomacy is just one half of how you can influence countries in For the Motherland, as espionage has been given some love. The biggest change is that coups may now be initiated manually from the intelligence screen. Previously, coups were a rare random event that resulted from too little support for the ruling party. Now, with the ability to manually order a coup, espionage has come into its own. As before, you need to use spies to generate enough support for your party (rather than the current ruling party). As support for your party increases, the government will face dissent penalties unless it invites members of the popular party into cabinet positions. When you reach enough support for your party and have a divided cabinet, you can initiate a coup. The chances of success are pretty slim, and the only way to make them better is to have massive support for your party and low national unity. But if you can pull it off, a coup removes the country from its faction (if applicable) and moves them much closer to your faction. For example, in my game as the Soviet Union, I overthrew Japan’s government, pulling them out of the Axis and putting a communist dictatorship in power, ending any chance that the Axis would invade Russia from Siberia. However, I think my proudest moment was overthrowing France’s democracy and installing a fascist dictatorship in Paris the day before I, as Germany, invaded Poland. Let’s just say that the British had the most confused foreign policy I have ever seen in an HOI3 game after that. Note that in spite of these successes, I had plenty of failures, too. And since spies cost leadership, you have to invest some serious effort into coups in order to get them to pay off, with the added problem that totalitarian regimes resist these efforts much better than democracies because of their counter espionage bonuses. You aren’t going to overthrow Hitler in 1938 and avoid a war, so rather than overthrowing Germany, you should probably research some better armor for your tanks. Furthermore, once the entire world is involved in the war, coups might not make as much of a difference. Like everything else in the game, it’s about making prudent decisions in both the long and short term.