Dev Diary: Yugoslavia and Romania

This is the patch that will be released alongside Battle for the Bosporus. Today we’re going to be focusing on some content coming with the patch that will add new content for owners of the Death or Dishonor expansion. Everything that follows will be accessible to DoD owners and will not be unlocked by purchasing Battle for the Bosporus. Some of you may already know this from the leaked screenshot on the Steam store, but Yugoslavia will be getting a light rework coming free with the patch for any owners of Death or Dishonor.

When I originally joined full-time on the project, I was given a list of common complaints from the community regarding the content in Death or Dishonor. Most of these issues were trivial, but none had a longer list of complaints than Yugoslavia so it seemed right that instead of attempting to stitch together a series of minimal low-visibility fixes, it would be best to do a partial rework of the Yugoslavia tree.

This is not quite to the scale of previous major reworks, however. The first draft of changes began as something I worked on out of my free time, so I wanted to keep scope low and avoid creating too much extra work on top of the existing BftB content while improving the overall quality of the Yugoslavia tree to give players more options to explore both history and alt-history.

Let’s begin with the communist focuses, which have seen a little change. For a long time, Yugoslavia was able to branch off and make its own faction with itself, Bulgaria, and Albania but the chances of getting those nations to become Communist in a regular playthrough was pretty dang low. So, Yugoslavia now gains access to a series of decisions to steadily support a peasant’s uprising in both Bulgaria and Albania, creating a viable way to bring them into the Pan-Slavic Worker’s Congress.

Once done, Yugoslavia will gain access to a whole slew of new focuses with their faction reorganizing into the Pan-Balkan Worker’s Congress. Romania, Turkey, Greece, and Hugnary are all valid targets for peasant uprisings, so if you ever wanted to see the Balkans start wearing purple, Tito now has all the tools to do it.

Next, we’ll take a look at the old monarchist focuses and how overall the decisions you made were pretty objectively one good decision and one bad. What I really liked about Yugoslavia was the fact that you were constantly making decisions with every focus you pick, following this kind of ladder-design, but with the new tree, I wanted to take that a step further and create some more meaningful and involved choices.

At the very start of their focus tree, Yugoslavia has a choice to either pursue Evolution or Limited Self-Government. Evolution is basically the old Yugoslavia design, where you attempt to stomp out nationalism in your country by whatever means you see fit.

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First, establishing the Banate of Croatia no longer makes Croatia a puppet and instead gives Yugoslavia a temporary softer version of Croatian Opposition, but choosing to Crush the Ustase is now a much more involved process and can result in Croatian Nationalism being removed entirely. Crushing the Ustase is a series of decisions tied to two missions. One mission will make the Ustase rise up in an independence war, and the other will peacefully stamp them out. Players have access to a number of decisions to