Finnish Defense

Finnish Defense 1944 is a classic turn based strategy game which takes place on the WWII Eastern Front in the summer of 1944. From Joni Nuutinen: by a wargamer for the wargamers since 2011. Brought up-to-date with game-series on January 2026.


Can you lead the Finnish forces brilliantly enough to stop the massive Red Army offensive that aimed to knock Finland out of the Second World War? The years 1942–1944 were quiet on the Finnish part of the Eastern Front: soldiers did wood whittling, few saw combat, and the wrong places of the front line were fortified, all this while the Red Army was taking lessons in modern warfare from the Wehrmacht.

When the Soviet strike finally fell in the summer of 1944, it was a huge, well-practiced attack by a thoroughly trained army with unprecedented artillery barrages against Finns who had just extended their summer holiday leaves. The game ends when you either control all the victory points or have lost control of all the VPs (you held on as long as possible).

At the Karelian Isthmus front, the Red Army had on average 120 Red Army artillery pieces for every kilometer of frontline, with 220 artillery pieces per kilometer on the breakthrough sector at Valkeasaari. In addition to heavy coastal artillery of the Leningrad area and the guns of the capital ships of the Baltic Fleet, Stavka had also assigned heavy siege artillery (280 to 305 mm) in support of the massive Soviet offensive.

FEATURES:

+ Historical accuracy: Campaign mirrors the historical setup.

+ Thanks to in-built variation and the game's smart AI technology, each game provides a unique war gaming experience.

+ Competitive: Measure your strategy game skills against others fighting for the Hall of Fame top spots.

+ Settings: Plentiful options to alter the look of the gaming experience: Change difficulty level, hexagon size, what resources are in play, Animation speed, choose icon set for units (NATO or REAL) and cities (Round, Shield, Square, block of houses), decide what is drawn on the map, and much more.

+ Decent enough AI: Instead of simply mindlessly attacking on direct line towards the target, the AI opponent balances between strategic goals and smaller tasks like encircling nearby units.


A Soviet draft for The Unconditional Surrender of Finland, discovered from the Foreign Ministry archive in Moscow, dated June 1944:
"The Finnish Government acknowledges the complete defeat of the Finnish Armed Forces in the war against the USSR and announce the unconditional surrender of Finland... The Finnish Defence Forces will carry out the disarming of all Finnish land, air, and naval forces... Until the Soviet Military Forces has taken under its control all communications connections in Finland, all radio broadcasts in Finnish territory are forbidden, and Finnish telegraph, telephone, and radio connections to other countries will be cut off... The Supreme Command of the Soviet Military Forces, by its own military forces and at its own discretion, will occupy partially or fully the territory of Finland, her harbors, the archipelago of Åland, and the islands of the Gulf of Finland."