National Focus

A national focus is a long-running national decision: a reconstruction plan, a defense doctrine, an alliance commitment, an atomic program, a wartime choice. Each country has only one focus slot. Whatever you are working on blocks everything else, so choosing a focus also means putting off every other one.

Focuses are grouped into focus trees, and a country can see several trees at once. In the 1946 campaign the trees are not a complete board laid out on the first day. They open and close on the timetable of the era, so you live through particular moments instead of picking from an open menu.

Running a focus

A focus has no upfront political cost. It draws political capital every day it advances, 1 a day by default. If you cannot pay, the focus simply waits. Durations vary with the scale of the commitment: about a month for a short administrative measure, around three months for a strategic commitment, and four for a major legislative project.

Some focuses also cost money. A cost can be charged once at the start, every month while the focus runs (it appears as a line in the monthly budget), or once at the end. Money never blocks a focus. A treasury that cannot pay goes into Debt.

You can pause an active focus at any time. It keeps its progress and its slot, uses no political capital and does not advance until you resume it.

What focuses do

When a focus finishes, its effects can:

• give the country lasting modifiers that record a political direction;
• change relations with other countries or with a whole ideological bloc;
• raise or lower public support and the standing of particular Factions;
• unlock technology or open the way to a research program;
• enact a law, or give a law a head start toward its reform;
• move money between countries, for example as reconstruction aid;
• reveal or unlock further focuses and whole trees.

Effects can depend on your country's situation at the moment the focus finishes, so the same focus can turn out differently depending on how you reached it. Events and other focuses can also bank progress toward a named focus. When you start that focus, it skips the banked time and political capital.

Trees, gates and windows

A focus can only be selected when it is visible, its timing and political requirements are met, and its prerequisites are complete. The focus screen shows what is missing, instead of hiding it.

• Hidden trees do not appear until the right moment. A tree for defending Formosa only appears once the Taiwan Strait is under threat.
• Locked focuses can be visible but unusable, waiting on an earlier focus or an event.
• Earliest dates keep a focus closed until a set day of the campaign. The tooltip shows the date.
• Research requirements keep strategic focuses out of reach until the country has the technical groundwork, such as nuclear physics, reactors, missiles or supersonic flight.
• Closing windows shut a tree once its era or opportunity has passed.

Mutually exclusive choices and bypassed focuses

Many trees offer pairs of commitments where picking one closes the other. A focus that can no longer be taken, because its rival was completed, its window passed or one of its prerequisites was closed, is bypassed. Bypassing is permanent: you cannot collect every reward by waiting.

Focus-only laws

Some laws can only come through a national focus. While that focus is a few steps ahead of you in an open tree, the law cannot be taken as an ordinary reform, and the reform panel says it "must come through the national direction first". Finishing the focus enacts the law or opens its reform with a head start. If the focus is bypassed, the ordinary reform becomes available again. The Soviet satellites' collectivization path works this way.

The 1946 campaign trees

United States

The United States opens with three agendas, each starting with one opening focus: Peacetime Prosperity (civilian reconversion and the next veterans' benefits expansion), Shape the Postwar Order (expanding the Foreign Service, reconstruction aid, and occupation recovery for Germany or Japan) and Confront Soviet Expansion (intelligence coordination, a choice between great-power negotiation and guarantees for Iran and Turkey, and later a choice between an atomic-restraint proposal and a strategic bomber buildup). All three share the one focus slot. Each agenda has two successive decisions with two exclusive commitments apiece.

Later agendas arrive with their periods: civil rights from December 1946; the Fair Deal, European alliances, defense institutions, intelligence expansion and strategic deterrence from 1947; containment in Asia from 1950; the mid-fifties administration and the New Look doctrine from 1953; and science and space from 1957. Taiwan and Korea are crisis trees. The Korean War tree, opened by the war in 1950, offers real branches: accept an early ceasefire, push to the Yalu to unify the peninsula, or escalate after China intervenes.

Soviet Union

The Soviet trees are built around the competing centers of power in a one-party state: the party apparatus, hardliners, the security organs, the armed forces, industrial managers, agricultural interests and reform communists. They cover late postwar reconstruction and the security state, the thaw and its reforms, the socialist bloc and revolutionary partners in Asia, the nuclear and space races, the split with China, and superpower competition. A separate, fast-moving Warsaw Pact tree opens only once NATO admits West Germany.

Others

The People's Republic of China has trees for revolutionary consolidation, the Korean War intervention, socialist transformation and the crises that follow, Asian statecraft, strategic deterrence, the split with Moscow and the later opening to the world. France has trees for republican recovery and European integration, and for the choice between strategic autonomy and the Atlantic alliance, including an independent deterrent. Generic nuclear technology, nuclear energy and nuclear weapons trees are available to any country they suit (see Nuclear Program).

International organizations run focus trees of their own on the same model, but only the organization's leader can advance them, and the leader pays the cost.

Focuses and research

Focuses and research depend on each other. Some of the largest state programs, such as strategic weapons and dedicated space missions, require a completed focus before they can be researched. In the other direction, many focuses require groundwork in aviation, nuclear physics or electronics before you can commit to them.

The focus screen

The focus screen shows one focus at a time. Moving sideways steps through the focuses you can start now. Up looks ahead to what the selected focus leads to, showing at most three successors. Back is the stack of focuses already followed on the current route, with the route's start furthest to the left.

The AI

At the start of each month, an AI country with no focus running and at least 25 political capital starts one from the trees it can see. The choice is weighted by each focus's appeal to that country's situation, with some randomness. Focuses below a minimum appeal are never started, which keeps the generic trees with the countries they suit. The nuclear tree's opening focus, for example, scores low except for the historical nuclear aspirants in their periods and for large economies' civilian programs from 1955 onward.