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?
I have no clue how big of an audience there would be for this on Substack. But HoI4 has a playerbase bigger than the rest of Paradox GSGs combined. There are probably more HoI4 threads on /vst/ than threads for any other individual video game. I think there are more Sid Meier's Civilizations players than HoI4, so it isn't the king of strategy games overall, but HoI4 definitely has the GSG market cornered.
Also I'd call HoI4's grand strategy waters pretty shallow, honestly. EU4 is a deeper game, IMO. Victoria II is probably as deep as it gets.
I see what you mean. To me, HoI4 is the “draw the arrow to tell your troops where to go and then click the go button and they’ll fight the war for you” game.
I said deep, not necessarily complicated. Victoria II is extremely open-ended and driven by dynamic systems like changing demographics and the market. It’s part wargame, part industrial society simulator.
The divisions thing is honestly kinda hard for me. I played as Germany and sent, like, 30 airborne divisions into an entrenched American infantry frontline of maybe 10 divisions (the idea being they would defeat entrenchments by parachuting) and they got nuked. That's a lot more strategy than the stupid pips and rock paper scissors combat of EUIV
Airborne troops are really quite weak and best used for landing behind enemy lines and causing havoc while your main army makes its push. Think about paratroopers slowly floating down with those big white parachutes; in real life, they'd get butchered by machine-gun fire before they ever hit the ground.
Supply is everything in HoI4, and paratroopers are obviously vulnerable to supply problems because they land behind enemy lines. Usually if you're having problems with combat in HoI4, it's because of supply problems. Either you have too many men in one small area for your roads and railroads to handle, or you aren't producing enough equipment for them to be combat-effective in the first place.
If you have 30 normal infantry divisions, well-supplied, attacking 10 entrenched enemy infantry divisions, you should be able to defeat them under normal circumstances.
Good summary of things, can't wait to read the part on TNO.
As for KR, the Russia rework did finally come out recently, and it's pretty good. They toned down the minigames a lot from the Germany rework, and all the political paths left, right, and center are flavorful without being total wish-fulfillment.
The war is still mostly railroaded, but at least the Russia rework gives you some geopolitical flexibility in the lead-up to it.
That's actually good to hear. I have only played KX, not KR, since 2022, so I really don't know what contemporary KR looks like. I still like it overall, even if it doesn't feel the same from the glorious early days when it was the king of the Steam Workshop. Any criticisms I have of KR pale in comparison to what you're going to read in the TNO article.
I only played hoi4 Kaiserreich (think I discovered it around 2018?) but one thing i always found a little weird was the relative lack of unambiguous liberal democracies. Who do we have, the Pacific States and maybe Canada (which here has a monarch with non-trivial political power)? Sand France is a military Junta, the socialist countries are all, well, socialist, and the old Cental Powers are outright monarchies.
I think the idea is that the triumph of Imperial Germany and fall of the western powers sort of discredits liberalism as an ideology, in the same way that monarchism was on the permanent decline after WWI IRL. It's considered a "failed experiment," so to speak, so the West either tries to emulate Germany's Prussian constitutionalism (Edward VIII in Canada; monarchists and authoritarians in Sand France) or synthesize what's left of democracy with socialism (the Syndicalist Internationale). Kaiserredux gives the player a lot more chances to rejuvenate democracy, but it also gives the player chances to do any insane crazy thing they want in any country.
Very good and I can see the nubs and germs of criticism of TNO. My qualified defense of the Germany rework is that Germany occupies the position of OTL/base game US in the mod. You have very little to do except for build your army, spam volunteers to keep the Balkans/East Asia/USA in line and prepare for the two-front war. Pre-rework Germany was incredibly boring to play, with an underdeveloped focus tree/political system and little to do in the first three years. The political sim and card game that's been added are TNO-style variable games, but it doesn't feel like the goal of the playthrough, narratively or structurally.
I've followed TNO in some form or another since their announcement, and one thing which they took very seriously was the idea of "video games as art." I think Disco Elysium and FNV loomed very large in their imaginations, but Hoi4 is such a massive and variable game that they had to do a few things to realize this vision which fundamentally make it unfun to play. One is that they had to railroad the entire storyline of the game into a handful of wars and locked down diplomatic options otherwise, so there's zero dynamism. You either win or you fail (and lots of these wars are maddening and slow, like the Russia unifiers). The second is that they recruited a massive team of uneven skill levels. So the visual novel approach is often quite amateurish, and so is the "realism turn" in the last few years.
Hoi4 modding changes can generally be fit into a foursquare or political compass graph where the two axes are "lore quality" and "gameplay quality." Lots of the early Kaiserreich updates were gimme fixes that could satisfy both requirements: the Italian civil war would either be a wash, because France would invade the north early, causing a cascading failure the defensive AI couldn't handle (Austria would collapse, then Germany from the south) or turn into a permanent slog. The US avoiding the civil war means waiting for world tension to tick up and running through a boring focus tree. The recent releases have shifted towards being heavier on lore quality, but the balance is a matter of plausible debate.
TNO has done sort of the opposite, where the game was very fun at 0.1 and the lore was pretty decent (with some severe and notable exceptions), but updates have often added poor lore and cut good gameplay. Soon, they'll rework Germany and cut the GCW. That'll be the end of TNO, since only America will be fun to play (arguably already the case) and it'll only be fun because it can fight 8 proxy wars and has a built-in polsim that's reasonably dynamic.
Another banger. I definitely prefer the Kaiserredux mod over KR solely for the Second American Civil War alone. And also because you can avoid the civil war, which devs KR removed. Still haven’t forgotten that. Huey Long is my guy by the way! Every Man A King! ✊🏻
OWB Enclave Reborn is probably my favorite HOI4 modded run ever. It’s so satisfying playing as “good guy Enclave” and liberate the Wasteland.
I remember playong KR in it's glory days. I was in Highschool and it helped me learn German, I could sing Die Wacht am Rhein by heart. Haven't played it in years.
Also I 2nd Horsemod being really good, it's HoI4 Anbennar imo.
Any chance of a mod for this, or a similar, game being developed where the Entente still wins WWI but Russia avoids going Bolshevik? I'd like to see what would happen if, for instance, a non-Bolshevik Russia would have tried conquering Anatolia in order to unify almost all of the Turkic peoples under Russian rule, a kind of Pan-Turanism under the Russian aegis.
Your best bet would be Red Flood. The Whites win the Russian Civil War and can go many directions from there. I am pretty sure there is some kind of Eurasianist path, but you'd have to look it up to find the specifics.
It differs from OG Kaiserreich and new Kaiserreich.
In old KR, Italy is split in half between a liberal north and a communist south: the Italian Federation and the Socialist Republic of Italy.
In newer KR, it was entirely Balkanized after WWI by Austria-Hungary, who hoped they could divide and conquer with a bunch of petty kingdoms. This failed really badly, and now the Italian states are trying to put themselves back together. You have a Republic of Italy in Milan that can go liberal or fascist, the SRI is now moved to Tuscany and Savoy but is otherwise the same, there are the Papal States in Rome, a Bourbon conservative monarchy in the Two Sicilies that can either liberalize or go hardcore Catholic integralist empire, and the remnants of the Savoyard monarchy in the Kingdom of Sardinia. Balkanized Italy is actually pretty fun to play, I like Two Sicilies. Kaiserredux adds tons of extra unique paths to all of these countries.
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.
I touch more deeply upon this subject as the series progresses. Stay tuned for parts 4 and 5.
Thanks
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?
I have no clue how big of an audience there would be for this on Substack. But HoI4 has a playerbase bigger than the rest of Paradox GSGs combined. There are probably more HoI4 threads on /vst/ than threads for any other individual video game. I think there are more Sid Meier's Civilizations players than HoI4, so it isn't the king of strategy games overall, but HoI4 definitely has the GSG market cornered.
Also I'd call HoI4's grand strategy waters pretty shallow, honestly. EU4 is a deeper game, IMO. Victoria II is probably as deep as it gets.
EUIV is pretty deep, but it’s very buttons driven. You just push a button and something happens. To me, that’s a lot less realistic than HOIV
I see what you mean. To me, HoI4 is the “draw the arrow to tell your troops where to go and then click the go button and they’ll fight the war for you” game.
Victoria 2 is much easier to understand for me compared to hoi or eu4. What’s so complicated about it compared to those other games?
I said deep, not necessarily complicated. Victoria II is extremely open-ended and driven by dynamic systems like changing demographics and the market. It’s part wargame, part industrial society simulator.
If you can do EU4 you can do HoI4. If anything Europa is more complicated/ harder
The divisions thing is honestly kinda hard for me. I played as Germany and sent, like, 30 airborne divisions into an entrenched American infantry frontline of maybe 10 divisions (the idea being they would defeat entrenchments by parachuting) and they got nuked. That's a lot more strategy than the stupid pips and rock paper scissors combat of EUIV
Airborne troops are really quite weak and best used for landing behind enemy lines and causing havoc while your main army makes its push. Think about paratroopers slowly floating down with those big white parachutes; in real life, they'd get butchered by machine-gun fire before they ever hit the ground.
Supply is everything in HoI4, and paratroopers are obviously vulnerable to supply problems because they land behind enemy lines. Usually if you're having problems with combat in HoI4, it's because of supply problems. Either you have too many men in one small area for your roads and railroads to handle, or you aren't producing enough equipment for them to be combat-effective in the first place.
If you have 30 normal infantry divisions, well-supplied, attacking 10 entrenched enemy infantry divisions, you should be able to defeat them under normal circumstances.
Good summary of things, can't wait to read the part on TNO.
As for KR, the Russia rework did finally come out recently, and it's pretty good. They toned down the minigames a lot from the Germany rework, and all the political paths left, right, and center are flavorful without being total wish-fulfillment.
The war is still mostly railroaded, but at least the Russia rework gives you some geopolitical flexibility in the lead-up to it.
That's actually good to hear. I have only played KX, not KR, since 2022, so I really don't know what contemporary KR looks like. I still like it overall, even if it doesn't feel the same from the glorious early days when it was the king of the Steam Workshop. Any criticisms I have of KR pale in comparison to what you're going to read in the TNO article.
Did the Austria-Hungary rework ever come out?
Not yet. It's still in the works though supposedly.
I only played hoi4 Kaiserreich (think I discovered it around 2018?) but one thing i always found a little weird was the relative lack of unambiguous liberal democracies. Who do we have, the Pacific States and maybe Canada (which here has a monarch with non-trivial political power)? Sand France is a military Junta, the socialist countries are all, well, socialist, and the old Cental Powers are outright monarchies.
I think the idea is that the triumph of Imperial Germany and fall of the western powers sort of discredits liberalism as an ideology, in the same way that monarchism was on the permanent decline after WWI IRL. It's considered a "failed experiment," so to speak, so the West either tries to emulate Germany's Prussian constitutionalism (Edward VIII in Canada; monarchists and authoritarians in Sand France) or synthesize what's left of democracy with socialism (the Syndicalist Internationale). Kaiserredux gives the player a lot more chances to rejuvenate democracy, but it also gives the player chances to do any insane crazy thing they want in any country.
God I wish the Kaiser won
Very good and I can see the nubs and germs of criticism of TNO. My qualified defense of the Germany rework is that Germany occupies the position of OTL/base game US in the mod. You have very little to do except for build your army, spam volunteers to keep the Balkans/East Asia/USA in line and prepare for the two-front war. Pre-rework Germany was incredibly boring to play, with an underdeveloped focus tree/political system and little to do in the first three years. The political sim and card game that's been added are TNO-style variable games, but it doesn't feel like the goal of the playthrough, narratively or structurally.
I've followed TNO in some form or another since their announcement, and one thing which they took very seriously was the idea of "video games as art." I think Disco Elysium and FNV loomed very large in their imaginations, but Hoi4 is such a massive and variable game that they had to do a few things to realize this vision which fundamentally make it unfun to play. One is that they had to railroad the entire storyline of the game into a handful of wars and locked down diplomatic options otherwise, so there's zero dynamism. You either win or you fail (and lots of these wars are maddening and slow, like the Russia unifiers). The second is that they recruited a massive team of uneven skill levels. So the visual novel approach is often quite amateurish, and so is the "realism turn" in the last few years.
Hoi4 modding changes can generally be fit into a foursquare or political compass graph where the two axes are "lore quality" and "gameplay quality." Lots of the early Kaiserreich updates were gimme fixes that could satisfy both requirements: the Italian civil war would either be a wash, because France would invade the north early, causing a cascading failure the defensive AI couldn't handle (Austria would collapse, then Germany from the south) or turn into a permanent slog. The US avoiding the civil war means waiting for world tension to tick up and running through a boring focus tree. The recent releases have shifted towards being heavier on lore quality, but the balance is a matter of plausible debate.
TNO has done sort of the opposite, where the game was very fun at 0.1 and the lore was pretty decent (with some severe and notable exceptions), but updates have often added poor lore and cut good gameplay. Soon, they'll rework Germany and cut the GCW. That'll be the end of TNO, since only America will be fun to play (arguably already the case) and it'll only be fun because it can fight 8 proxy wars and has a built-in polsim that's reasonably dynamic.
Another banger. I definitely prefer the Kaiserredux mod over KR solely for the Second American Civil War alone. And also because you can avoid the civil war, which devs KR removed. Still haven’t forgotten that. Huey Long is my guy by the way! Every Man A King! ✊🏻
OWB Enclave Reborn is probably my favorite HOI4 modded run ever. It’s so satisfying playing as “good guy Enclave” and liberate the Wasteland.
Looking forward to the TNO part. 👍 Peace ✌🏻
This is a man of patrician taste right here
Thank you.
I remember playong KR in it's glory days. I was in Highschool and it helped me learn German, I could sing Die Wacht am Rhein by heart. Haven't played it in years.
Also I 2nd Horsemod being really good, it's HoI4 Anbennar imo.
Any chance of a mod for this, or a similar, game being developed where the Entente still wins WWI but Russia avoids going Bolshevik? I'd like to see what would happen if, for instance, a non-Bolshevik Russia would have tried conquering Anatolia in order to unify almost all of the Turkic peoples under Russian rule, a kind of Pan-Turanism under the Russian aegis.
Your best bet would be Red Flood. The Whites win the Russian Civil War and can go many directions from there. I am pretty sure there is some kind of Eurasianist path, but you'd have to look it up to find the specifics.
WTF did they do to italy?!
It differs from OG Kaiserreich and new Kaiserreich.
In old KR, Italy is split in half between a liberal north and a communist south: the Italian Federation and the Socialist Republic of Italy.
In newer KR, it was entirely Balkanized after WWI by Austria-Hungary, who hoped they could divide and conquer with a bunch of petty kingdoms. This failed really badly, and now the Italian states are trying to put themselves back together. You have a Republic of Italy in Milan that can go liberal or fascist, the SRI is now moved to Tuscany and Savoy but is otherwise the same, there are the Papal States in Rome, a Bourbon conservative monarchy in the Two Sicilies that can either liberalize or go hardcore Catholic integralist empire, and the remnants of the Savoyard monarchy in the Kingdom of Sardinia. Balkanized Italy is actually pretty fun to play, I like Two Sicilies. Kaiserredux adds tons of extra unique paths to all of these countries.