Developer Diary | Ethiopia #1

MAJOR DISCLAIMER - This dev diary is written before the majority of art has been delivered, so it features a lot of placeholder graphics - you have to imagine really cool focus icons, and a lot of characters with hats that are beyond fabulous, for example

But we have some cool art coming! Work in progress image of Ethiopian Irregular Infantry

So, I was asked to write a dev diary about the development of a focus tree and related stuff for Ethiopia. Mainly because I was the one asked to do Ethiopia in the first place*, I guess. It would probably have felt weird to do a dev diary on something else then…

Anyway, Ethiopia. I wanted to make playing Ethiopia a somewhat different experience than the average game of HoI. It has to be, right? For one, Ethiopia starts at war, which puts some constraints on the design. Also, it is a war that they historically lost. After the initial invasion in October 35 they more or less managed to push the Italians back to their starting positions in what became known as the christmas offensive, but by the time we are entering the scene the Italians were preparing to once again go on the offensive. And historically this time Ethiopia didn’t stand a chance. However, in 1942 Ethiopian units such as the Gideon force and the Arbegnoch were fighting alongside the Allies to retake their country. So the design had to feature that as well.

But enough of that - lets take a look at Ethiopia and what we did with it for the DLC:

The Themes

The theme of the design for Ethiopia was actually twofold. Firstly it is about survival. As mentioned, you start under attack from Italy. Outgunned and outmanned. So initially you will mainly focus on finding a way to survive. There will be a few different options there, some that will be discussed today, and some that will be discussed later. Secondly, it is about modernization. Ethiopia was not industrialized at all, and the army was in many ways still partly feudal; and as such you will need to work hard to improve the country and the armed forces if you are to compete with the rest of the industrialized world.

Country set up

Now then, let’s take a look at how Ethiopia looks in-game in 1936: First you might have noticed, that Haile Selassie has himself a new trait - with one of the cooler names so far in HoI history​

And the country also starts with a set of national spirits (compared to before where it was severely lacking on that front): Not all of which are entirely positive however….​ ​

The map

One of the first things you will see is that what used to be a single state called Ethiopia is now split up into a bunch of new ones. Some of the extremely large provinces have been split into smaller ones as well, to allow for a more interesting gameplay and more realistic combat and supply-lines. While doing that I also added a few victory points to make the map look a bit more interesting, and to give the players something more concrete to fight over. Finding the right level when doing this is always a bit of a balancing act between gameplay, consistency with other things, and what you would ideally want. Sacrifices were made, but this is what we ended up with:

Additionally, the Ogaden desert is now classed as - well, yes -