Hearts of Iron IV: Kaiserreich
Part 2 of the HoI4 series examines its first breakout alternate history mod.
In enterprise of martial kind,
When there was any fighting,
He led his regiment from behind—
He found it less exciting.
But when away his regiment ran,
His place was at the fore-o:
That celebrated,
Cultivated,
Underrated
Nobleman,
The Duke of Plaza-Toro!
Introduction
Welcome back to my deep dive on Hearts of Iron IV and its controversial modding community! If you missed part one, check out the links at the bottom of this article.
Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg
Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg is the granddaddy of WWII mapgame modding. It’s actually a mod of a mod of a mod that predates Hearts of Iron IV by many years. Hearts of Iron 2 had a mod called Darkest Hour, which was good enough that it got turned into its own game. Darkest Hour is basically just a general overhaul and had a longer lifespan than HoI2 itself, and it had a notable mod called “All the Russias.” This mod was an alternate history scenario that speculated on what the 20th Century would look like if the White Army had won the Russian Civil War. At the start of the game, there is no Soviet Union, but rather a Russian Republic, and the player is given many possibilities as to how they can decide the future of Russia. They can save the democratic republic, restore the monarchy, establish a fascist dictatorship bent on national revenge against the Germans, or try Round 2 of the Russian Revolution. This mod was popular and interesting because it shifted away from Germany over to Russia as the main character of WWII. They have all the agency, and Germany is just a reactive agent.
All the Russias got tweaked and adjusted over time, fleshing out the alternate history background until it became something entirely different: Kaiserreich. How did the Whites win the Russian Civil War? Well, the German Empire intervened to stop the communists. How did they do that? Well, they would have had to win the First World War. How did they do that? Well, America would have had to stay neutral and Germany would have had to be smarter in its strategic planning and luckier on the battlefield. But wait a minute, if Germany wins WWI and America stays neutral and there’s no Soviet Union, doesn’t this change everything that happens from here on out in the 20th century? It certainly does, and Kaiserreich explores the ramifications of these events in delightfully creative detail.
Germany is the hegemon of a new Europe, surrounded by a constellation of satellite states. Austria-Hungary is desperately trying to reform itself into something more suitable for the modern age. Russia is reeling from its WWI loss and is trying to decide how it’ll get its revenge. Britain and France collapse from socialist revolution, sending reactionary forces into exile in the colonies (the British monarchy into Canada, and French nationalists into Algeria, affectionately known as “sand France” by the mod’s playerbase). Germany swoops in to collect the far-flung colonies of these fallen empires, building a new order in Africa and East Asia. Stifled by isolationism, a lagging economy, and socialist agitation, the United States of America collapses into a three-way civil war between nationalists, socialists, and a centrist rump government led by Douglas MacArthur as a military dictator.
The scenario was expansive, and presented many different avenues for exciting conflicts with lots of player agency. No two playthroughs are alike, because every country has so many options, and it’s intelligently written to feel like history really could have happened this way. Make no mistake, however: Kaiserreich is a wargame, first and foremost. It had its share of ideological wish-fulfillment, but it took a very long time for it to reach a fever pitch.
The port of Kaiserreich from Darkest Hour to Hearts of Iron IV was anticipated long before the game was released. HoI3 was not very cooperative with mods, leaving KR fans wanting for an update on the classic scenario. When the mod finally released on the Steam workshop, there was celebration. Not only did the modders transfer this entire scenario over to a new game on a new engine, but they expanded on Hearts of Iron IV’s features such that it was a more enjoyable experience than the base game. Kaiserreich didn’t just provide a neat alternate history scenario, it had more fleshed out focus trees, more political leaders to choose from, an ideology system that actually reflected political ideologies to a semi-realistic extent, and a political stability system that was so good the Paradox developers actually implemented it in the vanilla game.
Its alternate history story also made better use of the game’s own features, even without the modding team’s improvements. Take, for example, the United States of America. In normal HoI4, the USA is crippled by the Great Depression and locked in by isolationism and it takes until 1941 to overcome it. The result is a boring slog of a game where the player is forced to sit there and do nothing at all for years, while Germany and Russia get to have fun early on with proxy wars in Spain and a generally more proactive stance on everything. In Kaiserreich, America spends the first year preparing for a civil war and then is thrown right into the thick of it in 1937. The result is that America is still going to be geopolitically removed from the war in Europe until about 1941 or so, meaning they won’t spoil the fun over there, but the American player gets to stay engaged and have fun fighting the civil war.
Another big example is Germany. In normal Hearts of Iron, Germany is a defeated power, humiliated by their loss in WWI, and has to spend the first few years building up to get everything back. In Kaiserreich, Germany is already the hegemon of Europe. So how do they knock Germany down a peg to make WWII a fair fight, while still giving Germany something to do? The answer is Black Monday, a crippling stock market crash that paralyzes Germany and sends an economic shockwave across the entire world. Instead of gearing up to annex Austria and the Sudetenland, Germany spends the first few years of the game putting out fires and trying to prevent its unstable puppets and colonies across the world from breaking away. Kaiserreich is full of clever solutions like this.
Amidst the euphoria, however, it was hard to notice that Kaiserreich, the king of the HoI4 modding scene, might have started to lead the community in the wrong direction.
The Political Ideologies of Kaiserreich
Let’s return to the political wish-fulfillment question. I remained intentionally vague earlier when I said “socialism” in reference to Kaiserreich, because KR tries really hard to obfuscate the presence of socialism. Their lore is that the failure of the Soviet Union discredited Marxism as a left-wing ideology, so when the Revolution came to Britain and France, it was replaced by anarcho-syndicalism. I admittedly am not smart enough when it comes to leftist political theory to understand the difference. Syndicalism is government by a union of workers’ syndicates, communism is government by a union of workers’ councils… I don’t really understand. But what this change means in Kaiserreich-world is “socialism is now mostly a good-guy ideology that is democratic.”
There’s some room for nuance, just a little bit of it, however. Syndicalism is broken up into three ideologies: orthodox syndicalism, radical socialism (IDK what this really means but I think it’s like anarchism), and “totalism,” which is what we would recognize as authoritarian, Soviet-style communism. The primary champions of Totalism in the mod are Oswald Mosely of Great Britain and Benito Mussolini of Italy—noteworthy fascist leaders in real life. Real life socialist figures like Trotsky and Stalin are notably absent from the mod; even if Russia restores socialist rule, they get other figures in charge like Bukharin or Tukachevsky.
Real life fascism, meanwhile, is kind of absent from the mod. It kind of makes sense, if Germany won WWI there would be no Nazism. Most of the IRL Nazis are either dead (Hitler, a war hero in the Bolshevik revolution), irrelevant (Himmler, a chicken farmer who settled in the German Baltic), in some benign position within the German Empire (Donitz, just another admiral), or are bad guy figures undermining the Kaiser (Goering, the Viceroy of German Central Africa). Most of the other fascists of history are either Totalist socialists or just absent and irrelevant. I think Corneliu Codreanu is the only notable IRL fascist leader in the mod. There are some nationalist figures in the mod who can take over major countries, but they’re ones who historically were kind of weird and hard to pin down ideologically, like Boris Savinkov and William Dudley Pelley.
All this is to say that socialism is whitewashed to a certain extent in the mod. It’s portrayed as a democratic good-guy ideology that does all the good guy things, except for the easily demarcated bad apples who all happen to be fascists anyway—so anything bad they do is Not Real SocialismTM. This mod came out when “Not Real Socialism” was a major motif in ideological debates. Meanwhile, a lot of nationalist figures are portrayed as being worse than they really were. William Dudley Pelley is the most notable example. He was a weird esoteric Christian cultist guy who thought black people had “dark souls” and espoused a quasi-socialistic ideology, and had a small and pretty irrelevant paramilitary IRL. In-game, he’s like the American Hitler who brings back slavery, creates a Handmaiden’s Tale Christian theocracy, and kills multitudes of children by banning the polio vaccine. Kaiserreich’s Pelley is, for all intents and purposes, a fictional character a la Turtledove’s Jake Featherston, and his in-game Silver Legion does not reflect any one specific real-life political program. Still, if you thought that this represented a political bias by the devs’ part, you haven’t seen anything yet.
This also came out at a time when the political compass was like a cool exciting new thing for autistic teenagers to obsess over (I played Nationstates, I know what’s up. I had a cringey Douglas MacArthur LARP country when I was 15), and Kaiserreich was the first big mod to hop on that trend. Instead of vanilla HoI4’s three ideologies plus one irrelevant non-ideology, Kaiserreich had ten:
Totalism
Syndicalism
Radical Socialism
Social Democracy
Social Liberalism
Market Liberalism
Social Conservatism
Authoritarian Democracy
Paternal Autocracy
National Populism
Not only is the pie chart more bright and colorful and fun to look at, but your country’s name and flag changes with every political iteration. If you’re a young, impressionable teenager who likes history and may or may not be on the spectrum, this is probably as fun to you as shaking a ring of keys is for a baby. Although it was kept to a tasteful minimum in Kaiserreich, future mods will iterate more on this to the point where it becomes playing with ideological dolls. More than just political ideologies, you start getting sub-ideologies, where the tenets of each and every regime are explained in excruciating detail.You’ll see later on how this delves into true “ideology wank.”
The Direction of Kaiserreich’s Development
Forgive me for discussing this one mod in such great detail, but it’s really an important mod because it lays the framework for everything that comes after. Early HoI4-era Kaiserreich represents something of a golden age for the modding scene, when prospects were bright and opportunities seemed limitless. The only bounds were people’s imaginations, and everyone had a brilliant idea that was imminently going to get released as its own mod and add just as much exciting gameplay possibilities as Kaiserreich did. And for the mods that had only come out, they were naturally going to get polished and improved until they reached some kind of pinnacle.
Lots of good mods came out at this time. There was Red Flood, a surreal, almost schizophrenic mod that took the more absurd elements of Kaiserreich’s alternate history setting and turned them up to 11. There was Equestria at War, a mod that /vst/ and reddit alike insist is really, really good, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to play through it and investigate because it’s a full-conversion My Little Pony mod with its own original setting. I told you the autism kind of gets out of hand here. There was Old World Blues, a mod that shifted the setting to the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout. OWB is seriously good, and the Enclave Reborn submod is probably the most fun you can have in Hearts of Iron IV, so I’ll give that one my hearty endorsement. And there were still even bigger, more ambitious ones on the horizon. Those of you who know anything about HoI4 modding know which big one I’ve declined to mention so far.
But getting back on topic, we have Kaiserreich. It was more complete on release than most mods will ever be, but it still had a way to go. Development continued for years, giving unique playable content to countries that hitherto had none, and fleshing out and sprucing up the already existing content. China was the last major relevant region that had no unique content, and it was starting to stick out like a sore thumb. Its lore was pretty contrived, too, and it was a very awkward blind spot in what was otherwise a rich and detailed scenario. The devs promised a China update, a complete overhaul of the region with varied gameplay and new, more robust lore, and everyone was excited.
I followed development eagerly and hanged upon every word of every incoming developer diary. I liked what I had seen; they meticulously researched the region and crafted a gripping narrative of feuding warlords and underground revolutionaries, trying to bring China back together to resist the encroaching influence of Japan and Germany. Every corner of the country had something unique to offer, with their own personalities, goals, and challenges, and each of them could potentially climb to the top and take over China for themselves. Everyone was anticipating this update, and the whole modding community awaited the result with bated breath. But man, was development a crawl. This mod took ages to update!
When it finally came out, however, it was a smashing success. Chinese content for KR blew anything the vanilla game had to offer out of the water. Although not every country on the map had unique content (and some still don’t), every region of Kaiserreich’s world was at least playable and had something cool going on. The KR team had just pulled off a major accomplishment, and everyone was excited for what else they had in store.
Unfortunately, this update is essentially the high water-mark of Kaiserreich and possibly of HoI4 modding as a whole. It took forever to come out, and I think it did a number on them, knowing how large of an undertaking future projects would become. This is also the last time a major expansion was added to the mod. All that followed would not be expansions, but reworks.
The rework curse would soon be upon us.
As the Ship of Theseus sailed onward, more and more members of the KR dev team were replaced by new recruits. They had a different vision for the mod’s continued development and steered it in a new direction. That direction would be one of “realism,” which I read more as historical determinism and an effort to bring Kaiserreich in line with the most boring parts of real 20th Century history. The quirky little things that gave Kaiserreich its unique flair and sense of humor were steadily phased out. New updates didn’t add new content, but adjusted existing content to fit this new vision or even entirely replaced old content. Leader portraits—an important detail HoI4, as I’ve discussed before—were all adjusted to be brought in line with a sense of uniformity. No more accessories, extravagant uniforms, or funny hats: everyone has to be hat-less and wearing a plain black suit and tie for their leader portrait.
Certain actions of a politically volatile nature were removed from the mod, such as the German Empire’s ability to resettle Latvia and Estonia with ethnic Germans and annex the land as a direct province of the Reich. Other ideas pending approval were shot down, such as political extremist paths for Canada. That one was especially unpopular, as the devs cited “Canada’s democratic traditions” as a reason why they would never harbor political extremism… when Britain has already fallen to socialist revolution, and both socialist and fascist takeovers are possible in the other democratic Anglosphere countries of Australia (which includes New Zealand in this mod), South Africa, and the neighboring United States of America. Apparently Canada has a magic constitution that prevents political upheaval from occurring.
After the China update, new updates also tended to involve obnoxious minigames, and that problem has only gotten worse in recent years. The Black Monday catastrophe that Germany suffers was just an event chain that you had to amend through decisions in the decision menu and focuses in the economic branch of the focus tree, but now it’s a… card game?
The minigame stuff started coming out after I stopped playing the mod, so I can’t comment on them in detail. The minigame problem is more emblematic of a certain other mod that I will get to next, but it’s evidently now bad enough that it’s bleeding over into other mods and affecting their gameplay. Sometimes a wargame should just be a wargame. The planned updates, meanwhile, started getting bigger and bigger in scope, taking longer to develop, and necessitated throwing out longstanding, essential lore, some of which dated all the way back to the days of All the Russias for HoI2: Darkest Hour. Eventually these reworks get in the way of other planned reworks and have to be re-reworked before they can ever get released, and it all just stalls and nothing ever happens. The Russia rework was stalled, I think indefinitely. The India rework was scrapped outright. I think America’s been reworked several times. The rework curse has killed several major mods, and Kaiserreich was one of the biggest to fall.
Kaiserredux
Enough Kaiserreich players got upset with the state of things that they quit the mod and made their own. It was originally titled Dankest Hour and was supposed to simply be a silly meme mod, but a schism within the dev team led to everyone but the main lead quitting and forming their own mod: Kaiserredux. KX, as it’s known, is kind of like the Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo of Kaiserreich. Everything is absurd, everything has a little tongue-in-cheek, and every focus tree assumes you’re the main character of the universe that’s going to save everything through your superior political ideology and buffs you accordingly. The result are massive world wars that have very silly matchups, like ultrafascist Catholic integralist Peru versus communist pan-Arab Malta that somehow managed to take over all of North Africa versus Miklos Horthy but instead of being dictator of Hungary he’s a pirate captain in Croatia. The only area where KX manages to be more plausible and realistic than KR is its American Civil War scenario, which has the coolest figure of the 20th Century in it: Oklahoma governor (more like dictator) Alfalfa Bill Murray.
Kaiserredux is fun, but it’s taxing on your computer because it’s got a million countries that each have a million divisions on the map. It’s also frustrating sometimes because the focus tree bloat buffs so many countries to the point where everyone is too strong. There’s no room for maneuver warfare on the western front, because every tile has 20 divisions on it and half of them are from weird countries like Ecuador and Vietnam. It’s hard to get a straight-up Germany vs Russia matchup in this mod because everything is so silly. An ideal mod would have KX’s sense of fun and dynamism while still keeping things toned down to an appropriate minimum like OG Kaiserreich. And if you thought Kaiserreich had ideology-wank, wait until you see Kaiserredux:
But I’ve beaten around the bush enough. And yes, I’m two articles in and I still haven’t really gotten to the point, because Kaiserreich is really just a prelude to the prima donna of HoI4 modding: The New Order.
Index
This is Part 2 of the HoI4 modding series on my Substack. Click the links below to access the other parts.
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Kaiserreich
Part 3: The New Order
Part 4: Toozer Mods
Part 5: Brainrot
Very interesting, I find that many Hoi4 alt history mods, and a lot of popular althistory scenarios in general tend to fit in a sort of "unhappy medium" with ridiculous scenarios that fall apart against the slightest scrutiny and are also formulaic and predictable.
As someone who is too stupid to play HOIV (I stay in the shallow grand strategy waters of Stellaris, CKIII, and EUIV), this is really interesting. Is there a big audience for this series?