Dev Diary: Republican Spain Focus Tree

Today's Development Diary, by Bratyn

Hola everyone, and welcome to yet another dev diary on the upcoming DLC for HoI4, where we’ll be talking about the second entirely new focus tree: Republican Spain.

Last week we talked a little bit about the design intent for Spain as a whole - so today we will move straight on to the interesting stuff ;)

Obligatory Disclaimer: This is still a work-in-progress, and much of the art, systems and balancing is/are not yet finished! You guys know the drill :)

Republican Spain Starting Situation

The full Republican Spain focus tree

The starting position for Republican Spain is, naturally, the same as that for the Nationalists. They begin with the same 4 spirits, signifying the influence of Carlism, the Military’s disloyalty, and the political violence and strikes that are escalating in the initial half of 1936 (see our previous dev diary for more information on these)

The same initial choice is present at the start of the game, but instead of selecting A Great Spain, we will now go with The Popular Front.

The Popular Front was a loose alliance of political parties that were only really united in their opposition of Fascism. The idea of a Popular Front was formulated by Stalin in the mid-1930s, suggesting that the rapid growth of Fascism required a more unified response than Communism alone could provide. Effectively, it gave permission to subordinate Communist parties to band together with less extreme socialist parties, and even outright bourgeois parties, solely to combat Fascism in national politics. In Spain, the Popular Front that opposed the Fascist/Traditionalist CEDA (Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights - sometimes called the “Nationalist Front”) consisted of a variety of liberal, socialist, and communist parties, the most important of which (for the purposes of this diary) are the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), and the Republican Left (IR). This coalition was also supported by regional nationalists and the Anarchist Trade Unions CNT/FAI. This coalition paid off, and despite massive resources and an overwhelming election campaign by the CEDA, the Popular Front won the 1936 Spanish elections.

This victory was to be short-lived, however. Unbeknownst to the Republicans, in the aftermath of the failed elections the CEDA would hand over their sizeable campaign chest to the plotting military leaders to finance a rebellion, and political violence from both sides would escalate in the coming months. As with the Nationalist side, this is represented by various decisions and missions. The sole distinction is the change in perspective. As all state garrisons are initially fully controlled by the Republican side anyway (they all begin with a Nationalist control of None), the garrison control decisions are unavailable until the Nationalist side has begun contesting Republican control in any location. From that point on, it becomes possible to attempt to flip them back.

A second point that sets the Republicans apart from their Nationalist adversaries are the nature of their focuses. The full pre-Civil War path for the Nationalists has a total duration of 210 days to complete, which means that, as long as a player continuously takes focuses, they are guaranteed to finish the whole path before the civil can start, even at the soonest start date. Not so for the Republicans. Republican pre-Civil War focuses (after the initial choice) last twice as long as their adversaries’, resulting in a total duration of 385 days to fully complete this path (therefore requiring the civil war to be