Hearts of Iron IV: The New Order
Part 3 of the HoI4 series takes a terrible look at the game's most controversial mod.
King Paramount: Is everything at a standstill in England? Is there no litigation there? No bankruptcy? No poverty? No squalor? No crime? No sickness?
Princess Zara: Plenty; it's the most prosperous country in the world! We must have omitted something.
King Paramount: Omitted something? Yes, that's all very well, but—
Sir Bailey Barre (whispering to Zara): Government by Party, that was the important thing.
Princess Zara: Of course! Now I remember! Why, I had forgotten the most important, the most vital, the most essential element of all!
King Paramount: And that is…?
Princess Zara: Government by Party! Introduce that great and glorious element—at once the bulwark and foundation of England's greatness—and all will be well! No political measure will endure, because one Party will assuredly undo all that the other Party has done; inexperienced civilians will govern your Army and your Navy; no social reforms will be attempted, because out of vice, squalor, and drunkenness no political capital is to be made; and while grouse is to be shot, and foxes worried to death, the legislative action of the country will be at a standstill. Then there will be sickness in plenty, endless lawsuits, crowded jails, interminable confusion in the Army and the Navy, and, in short, general and unexampled prosperity!
Introduction
Welcome back to my deep dive series on HoI4 and its modding community. This is the big one, the real meat and potatoes, so hold onto your hats. If you missed the previous two parts, see the index at the bottom of the article for links.
The New Order: The Last Days of Europe
The New Order: The Last Days of Europe is the most ambitious mod ever conceived for Hearts of Iron IV. Okay, maybe not conceived, because I’ve seen some stupidly overambitious mod proposals before (when we get to the “retarded HoI4 mods” section of this series and I get to show you Exordium…) But it is the Icarus of HoI4 modding: it flew too close to the sun and crashed horribly. The moment it released, TNO catapulted to the top of the modding scene, dethroning Kaiserreich as king of the workshop. If Kaiserreich was the venerable, grandfatherly patriarch of HoI4 modding, TNO is the beautiful and demanding prima donna soprano with a wicked attitude. What TNO is isn’t half as interesting as what it’s become and how it got there, but we should begin with a basic description.
TNO is an alternate history mod set in the 1960s after Germany wins the Second World War. Not only does this supply a distinct want within the HoI4 modding community, but it did so in style. Flashy graphics that outshine the best vanilla HoI4 has to offer, plenty of huge, expansive focus trees to complete, an intricate scenario with elaborate lore, and Cold War mechanics for diplomacy and economics that the vanilla game doesn’t come close to simulating. This mod had a cult following long before it was ever released, and boy did it take a long time to release. While Kaiserreich for HoI4 came out in 2017, TNO didn’t come out until 2019, even though development began in 2014. That’s right, TNO predates HoI4 itself.
TNO started development as a mod for Victoria II, the industrial-age strategy game I mentioned earlier. It was never meant to be a pure wargame, but rather a Cold War diplomacy game that could capitalize on Victoria II’s systems of great power diplomacy and economic influence. It centers around a Nazi Germany that triumphed in the Second World War and has become dangerously stagnant and overextended by the 1960s. You can play as Germany or Japan and try to save the sinking ships that are their empire, or play as the United States and try to put them on the back foot and keep them there. Reverse domino theory. Or you could play as some of the smaller countries themselves and choose your fate.
TNO was never meant to be a HoI4 mod and it shows. It only became one because Victoria II has such bad modding support, and Hoi4 has an exponentially larger playerbase. The mod, in its original configuration, was the brainchild of a former Stormfront user named ThePinkPanzer. Woah, woah, woah, Stormfront?! Does that mean this is one of those Nazi fantasy wish-fulfillment mods? Well, yes and no. It’s complicated.
Well he’s Polish, to start with. And now he’s transgender, but that was years after he left TNO. It should tell you something about his disposition, because the type of person who develops HoI4 mods has a very great overlap with transsexuals and political extremists. This will develop into a theme as we progress. Panzer used to be a Stormfront guy, and I think it was less because he felt convicted by the tenets of National Socialism and more because it was edgy and German tanks look cool. He was in the US Marines, after all. At any rate, he repented of this horrible sin and atoned by becoming a tankie Antifa guy. I think by the time TNO came out he was in his edgy “radical centrist” phase. You know, the type of people that put a Ukraine flag and #NAFO in their username once the Ukraine War broke out and are generally insufferably annoying. It’s also really easy to push Panzer’s buttons and get him riled up.
TNO is kind of the apotheosis of this sort of person. They love Nazism, but they hate it. And it reflects in the mod. Nazism is simultaneously this evil, dark, godlike force that’s extended its tendrils into every facet of the planet and soiled everything beyond repair. But it’s also full of evil bumbling retards who trip over their own shoelaces and Nazism is destined to fail because it’s so stupid and everyone who is a Nazi is an idiot, unlike really smart centrists who tolerate everybody. If Kaiserreich wanted to nudge you in a particular political direction, TNO wants to beat you over the head with a sledgehammer.
The Setting and Lore of TNO
The scenario starts with the death of Lenin, in which someone other than Stalin succeeds him as leader of the Soviet Union, and fails to industrialize the country to a point where it could sufficiently resist a German invasion.
Already, this reflects two ideas that I take issue with. The first is that only Joseph Stalin’s brutal reign of terror could modernize Russia (something that was already happening before WWI began, to an extent that it troubled the Imperial German general staff). It kind of justifies the reign of terror by making it seem like a historicall necessary thing so the good guys could win. The second is that Germany could not perform any actions on its own that could result in a Second World War victory; they can only win if their opponents trip over their shoelaces. I’m not saying a German victory was likely, much less eminent, but I do think it was entirely possible at the start in 1939. This is a conversation for another day, but historical determinism is a curse that’s grabbed ahold of modern historical discourse and ruined it. Everything’s got to be inevitable, everything’s a product of indefinable “forces of history” and nothing can ever be chalked down to discrete decisions, individuals, or events. I think it’s because liberals like to think it could never happen to them, and want to assure themselves that they’ll always win because they’re on the right side of history. The bad guys are always destined to lose! That’s a comforting thought. But I digress.
So Germany wins WWII, and they win in a very flashy fashion that doesn’t conform to more rigorously-researched German victory scenarios, which tend to involve aerial warfare, a successful push for either Moscow or the Caucasus, a Japanese invasion of Siberia, or alliances with powers like Spain or Turkey. In this scenario they just kind of win because they do. I don’t think the developers wanted to “validate” Nazi Germany by giving them a realistic victory method or even imply that they were competent at all in any capacity—Nazis always have to be drooling idiots. So Germany just wins by getting cheat codes for ten years. They do Operation Sealion to invade Britain, they build a nuke before America can and drop it on Pearl Harbor, and the war’s over. And the second the war is over, the cheat codes get turned off and Germany goes full retard.
Russia is split up into what is initially four or five rump states. A Red Army remnant between the German frontier and the Urals, a Stalinist splitter state in western Siberia that doesn’t like Bukharin’s way of doing things, a liberal republic in central Siberia, and the actual Soviet rump government led by the intelligence community in the Russian Far East, which is challenged by a resurgent White Russian collaborator army fresh out of exile in Japanese Manchuria. Each and every one of these factions splits up into five or six even smaller factions, which become the Russian warlords that form the backdrop for Russia in the game.
America is in political shambles after losing Hawaii, and the two-party system collapses into a two-by-two party system, where the center-right and center-left rally as the Republican-Democrats, and the nationalist right and progressive left unite as the National Progressive Party. That sounds really bizarre—and it is—but they are united on a basis of hawkish foreign policy, as opposed to the dovish RDs. Basically the parties crystallize depending on how the Civil Rights Act goes. So you either have center-left Democrats vs hardliner Nationalists, or center-right Republicans vs fervent Progressives, and the neglected wing of either coalition just jumps ship to the other side.
Japan is in decline just because it gets the shaft by the devs. Japan sucks. Why do they suck? Well, they’re fascist, so they’re evil, so their empire is going to fall apart. Is there anything you can do about it as Japan? Nope, you’re just along for the ride until it happens!
Germany is in decline and it’s in a very contrived way. Germany enslaves so many people during and after the Second World War that most ethnic Germans no longer work and are all impoverished peons of the megacorporations, but they’re simultaneously racist overseers like the ancient Aryans conquering India, getting fat off the toil of slaves. What it really is is a very thinly-veiled metaphor for United States racial conflict. Almost everything in this entire game is tied to racism in the USA. Panzer, maybe because he himself is a Polish-American, seems to think that Germans treated Poles the exact same way white Southerners treated negro slaves in 1850, which is somehow also the exact same way their descendants treated blacks in 1950. The German slave system is a metaphor for American segregation. The Japanese hegemony over China is a metaphor for American segregation. The German colonies in Africa are an especially heavy-handed metaphor for American segregation. The interactions between ethnic Russians and the various Siberian minority groups are a metaphor for American segregation.
Pardon me for saying this, but I don’t think every single country on earth has the same relationship with their minorities as white American Southerners do with African-Americans. And these aren’t subtle metaphors. They’re literally saying phrases like “separate but equal” in the German focus tree.
Like in Kaiserreich, the developers also instigate an economic crash to keep Germany down while the other powers are on the up-and-up. It feels a little contrived this time, however. Like they just stole the Black Monday idea from Kaiserreich and applied it to a situation where it isn’t super fitting. Isn’t Nazi Germany a socialist state with a lot of state-controlled enterprises? How does a Wall Street-style market crash happen in a socialist state-run economy that is simultaneously the Antebellum South where everyone is sitting atop a mound of wealth provided by miserable foreign slaves? It would be more interesting if they tried to realistically explore the kind of problems that a victorious Nazi Germany might run into in real life. An ossified party structure, stagnating planned economy with no sense of direction, maybe an overreliance on increasingly uncooperative trade partners—I’m just throwing ideas around here. The Germans do tons of other stupid stuff that brings them no obvious benefit, as well. They bomb Africa daily. I mean, hundreds of heavy bombers just fly over random locations in Russia and Africa literally every single day and drop heavy, expensive payloads on tribal villages just to be mean.
Just like how the death of Alexander Kerensky is the focal point of Kaiserreich, the death of Hitler is the focal point of TNO. Once he dies, a civil war breaks out in Germany between his rival successors. Speer leads the reformists, Bormann leads the orthodox NSDAP loyalists, Goering leads the ultra-hawkish militarists, and Heydrich leads the austere Schutzstaffel. It’s already a little far-fetched to imagine Germany fighting a 4-way civil war in which all 4 sides are Nazis, but Panzer thought it was cool. He also didn’t know how to write his way out of this, because after one side wins the civil war, you know, by killing everyone on the other sides, they still have to take their political factions into consideration. For some reason, even after you killed all the militarists as Speer, Goering’s #1 guy Ferdinand Schorner doesn’t get arrested or executed or exiled. You just let him rejoin the government and after the war you have to do what he tells you or else he launches a military coup, and naturally everything he tells you goes against your goals as a reformist. It’s because the devs want you to have this climactic showdown with Schorner in the lategame, and they didn’t want to think about how you could have internal conflict after already winning a civil war and keeping all your enemies.
I keep saying this: it is imperative to these people that their enemies always be not only evil, but also stupid and incompetent. There are so many more tangents I could go on to this end, but I’ll only discuss the ones that are relevant. But how does the mod actually play, anyway? If it’s fun to play, then the political narratives and crummy writing should be easily ignorable. That was the case for Kaiserreich, after all…
TNO’s Gameplay, or Lack Thereof
The reason I’m bringing up TNO is because it is an immensely popular mod and was very influential on the HoI4 modding scene. It took Panzer five years to develop, and it seems like he hated every second of it. He certainly hated Hearts of Iron IV and wished the mod would have worked on Victoria II. That alone takes a little bit out of it for me. I don’t enjoy works that were held in obvious contempt by their creators. It’s like watching a movie with Harrison Ford and knowing he hates the stupid movie and wishes he wasn’t there—it cheapens the performance. Panzer didn’t want a wargame, he wanted a high-stakes game of diplomatic intrigue and nuclear brinksmanship. Hearts of Iron IV is a purpose-built wargame and isn’t good at doing anything else, but TNO refused to comply.
You cannot manually declare wars in TNO. While Paradox strategy games are generally open sandboxes where you can set your own goals (HoI4 is, admittedly, the least sandboxy of them all), TNO is entirely railroaded. Every war you fight is scripted; it starts at a certain time between certain powers and will conclude with a certain outcome once certain conditions are met. The reliance on scripted events means that only certain countries are playable, and only for a set amount of time. The big three powers are playable, as are the Russian warlords and a few smaller powers, but most of the map just exists as a backdrop that can only be occasionally interacted with.
There are no great power wars, either. That makes sense, it’s a Cold War game. In this case, a three-way Cold War between the US, German, and Japanese spheres. TNO subscribes to and has done a good deal to promote a very pessimistic, totalistic view of conventional warfare, in that basically any shooting war between great powers will immediately escalate into a nuclear war. And if one nuke is getting fired, then each and every nuke in existence is getting fired at the same time, and that means the end of human civilization. This article is too long as is, but I’m just going to say that I don’t think that is true. Those of you who read my Fallen Continent series can already infer that, however.
Because gameplay is limited to small-scale proxy wars that happen at discrete intervals and allow for minimal player interaction, TNO has to provide some other means for the player to spend their time. What else does HoI4 have besides warfare? The decisions menu and the focus tree. Effectively, TNO is a visual novel game with political and military minigames on the side. The goal of the game is to click on decisions and national focuses and read the text that pops up as it tells a story.
This is why the political narrative is so bad. TNO is a narrative-centric game, and most of the gameplay is spent controlling bad guy factions that the game hates. It keeps piling on debuff after debuff along with sob story flavor text events telling you how evil you are for playing their game. It’s like Toby Fox’s Earthbound Halloween Hack (I never played Undertale). “Oh you’re so evil for killing people, how could you be so heartless!” Because it’s a freaking video game, dude! You’re here too, I don’t see you making mods for Tetris and Bejeweled. Not only is the writing bad, but it nags you. And if there’s one group of people that annoys me, it’s naggers.
Even most of your centrist liberals don’t get the luxury of being the good guy, you just get told how you’re just as bad as the Nazi gas chamber KillRapersTM because a minority just got his order wrong at the White Castle. Just like there are a lot of American civil rights allegories, there are a lot of stand-ins for the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and the evils of American imperialism. And just like the civil rights metaphors, none of the American imperialism metaphors feel entirely well-suited to the situation either. The only time this lets up is if you play as the designated good guy paths, who go to extreme lengths in their political wish fulfillment. Some of the far-left Russian warlords, namely the anarchists and the Leninist idealists, are so saccharine and flowery in their depiction of the emerging socialist utopia that it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Their right-wing counterparts, even the moderate ones, do not get such generous treatment. But the Reddit/Discord fanbase eats this crap up. They love talking about which playthroughs are BLESSED or CURSED and it’s basically just a question of “are they in the libleft quadrant of the political compass” or not.
The game is at its best when it goes all-in on the visual novel thing or tries to stay as close to the normal HoI4 experience as possible. The Russian warlords are fun because they’re warlords. You fight wars. Actual wars with dozens of divisions moving along a frontline, not these neutered proxy wars where you’re only allowed to send two divisions at the cost of immense political capital and then micromanage them on a stalemated front to act like you have control over this largely AI-driven conflict. At the other end of the spectrum is Guangdong, Japan’s corporate colony in southern China, a fully narrative experience where you try to achieve dominance as one of four competing megacorporations. I have to give credit where credit is due, the minigames in Guangdong are actually fun. I like designing my little products and trying to ship them to make mad money and buy off seats in the state legislature.
The minigames are not fun elsewhere. For some reason the writing team for the Asian countries is just better (it’s just Asians vs Asians so it’s harder to insert the American civil rights narrative, try as they might), but the minigames feel like they belong more. The election minigame in America is such a pain that it’s easier to just pick the other side and intentionally lose the election to get the party you want. And good luck if you screwed up the timing on the decisions. Everything in TNO happens on a tight, scripted schedule, so if you don’t click every single decision the second it becomes available, you can get locked into a failstate.
That’s okay when you’re playing as Russia, where you’re only involved in one conflict at a time and the decision notification will always appear in a timely fashion. But if you’re playing as America, you could get locked in three or four proxy wars at once, each of them with time-sensitive decisions and events, and you only get notifications for whichever conflict you currently have selected on the foreign policy screen. That means you have to go through the tedious process of pausing the game every single day and checking every single tab to make sure you’re not missing out on anything. If you miss the decisions or even just click them in the wrong order, you’re going to lose the Madagascar proxy war. And Americans are so fucking invested in Madagascar that they’ll never vote for your party if you screw it up. Every single American is a well-read foreign policy enthusiast who knows that Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere and if we can’t take Malaysia back from the Japs then the nukes’ll start flying like maybugs any day now.
You know what would be a lot more fun than this? Reading a book or playing another video game.
Late-Game TNO Sucks: The Oil Crisis Rant
This is a side tangent angry rant here, but I have to ramble for a minute here about what freaking sucks so hard about TNO. The late-game is miserable for every single country in the game besides Guangdong and the Russian warlords.
The brilliant writers of this mod don’t really know how make their story plot points happen through a reasonable chain of events that was set up ahead of time, so they just kind of brute force their way into it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its principal late-game crisis, the Oil Crisis, and its accompanying Slave Revolt in Germany.
So the early-game has a ton of stuff going on. The Reich is in trouble, Hitler dies and the generals all start fighting each other for succession, and that means the USA and Japan can try to steal away the peripheral powers at the edge of Germany’s sphere of influence. A lot of countries that were dependent on German aid and protection are now left on their own and collapse as a result. Basically, there’s a short early-game setup and an impressive early/mid-game crisis with lots of fires to put out. But once Germany settles its civil war and puts its house back in order, there’s not much left to do, right? How is the late-game going to be interesting to play?
TNO’s solution is an oil crisis in the early 1970s, basically just ripped directly off from the one in real life. The Middle East starts out under Italian hegemony, a mix of puppet Sheiks and actual colonies. Italy has had a falling-out with Germany and hates them now, plus they have a 50/50 chance of abandoning fascism altogether at the start of the game. In the mid-game, America and Japan jockey over who can get Italy to be their ally, and if they both fail then Italy stays neutral. In the early 70s, all of Italy’s allies in the middle east collapse into a bunch of big dumb civil wars with a bajillion sides. Somehow the entire world is dependent on Middle Eastern oil, so the world economy crashes really hard.
Already this is pretty stupid. Germany has access to its own sources of oil in Romania and the Caucasus. Japan has access to southeast Asian oil—that’s what they invaded the Dutch East Indies for back in WWII, after all. America still has domestic and Canadian oil, and you’d think decades of economic isolation from Europe would make them more self-sufficient. All the big three geopolitical spheres in TNO are pretty much economically isolated from one another, so none of them were dependent on Middle Eastern oil from the start. Most of them didn’t even have access to Middle Eastern oil. And depending on how the Russian warlord game plays out, by this point either Japan or the USA could already have access to Siberian oil within their trade network. I can see this Middle Eastern crisis messing up the Italian economy, and maaaybe by extension Germany, but the damage it does to America and Japan is absurd.
The first reason for this retarded crisis is to set up a big chain of wars in the Middle East, where Italy backs the sheiks and sultans, Germany backs the Ba’athists, Japan backs the Islamic fundamentalists, and America backs the liberals. Unless America chooses to back the Saudis, or if Italy sides with America or Japan, then it all gets messed up and it’s really stupid and doesn’t make sense. This string of wars can actually be resolved really quickly if you’re good at the proxy war thing, but winning the wars solves nothing. The economic maluses remain even if you win the wars. You just have to go down the stupid oil crisis focus tree, and finishing it only partially alleviates the extremely crippling oil crisis debuff. And since most AI countries don’t have focus trees, that means they’re keeping the oil crisis debuff at its worst possible level for the rest of the game. That means their economies will tank and you end up with stupid situations where Canada has the same GDP per capita as Zimbabwe. Since one of the main goals of TNO is to get the wealthiest economic sphere in the world, this basically ruins any plans you may have had.
So the war sucks, the economic stuff sucks, but the real reason for it all is to induce domestic panic in the various great power countries and shake up the political order that was starting to feel pretty comfy up to this point. Russia is the only country in the game that doesn’t suffer the crisis. Guangdong is the only country that suffers the crisis and it feels like it makes sense and the crisis is actually fun to manage. Every other country is just pain, and Germany is frustratingly stupid.
So there’s really only three paths you can pick as Germany. Heydrich—which we’ll explain later—is kind of a suicidal death run where you end in a failstate no matter what. Goering is also a suicidal death run where you either mess up early and end in a failstate, or escalate to WWIII and end in a failstate. The AI is hard-coded to never let either of these two factions win because they break so much of the game. That leaves Bormann, who is boring to play as, and Speer, the only fun one. Speer can go one of two ways. Either he reforms the Reich into a formidable modern dictatorship and frees up the markets for capitalism, or his secretly liberal ministers (known as the “Gang of Four”, Speer Germany is actually an analogue for post-Mao communist China) can plot against him and turn him into a puppet while steadily reforming Nazi Germany back into a democracy.
Playing as Speer, your goals are the purge the rot and get the gears of industry and business turning again, while reworking your colonial conquests into a more stable and permanent order. You spend the game fixing the German economy, steadily erasing slavery, cleaning up the military into a smaller, more professional force, opening up the country to international trade, and giving the colonies self-government so that Germany is more of a benevolent master and not an evil slavedriver. For much of the game, especially if you’re playing as the Gang of Four, it feels like you’re actually making Germany a better place, and the long-awaited abolition of slavery is right around the corner. Then this stupid oil crisis hits.
After you’ve spent the whole game bending over backwards to abolish slavery, improve the conditions of the workers, give the Slavs and Balts self-government, and resettle displaced slaves back into their homelands, these ungrateful pricks decide it’s not good enough and that they’re not patient enough to wait like 3 more months so you can click the “abolish slavery” button (which was a sham, TNO has lots of stuff like that. Focus trees you can’t complete, buttons you can’t click). They rise up in revolt, and somehow these dumbass impoverished slaves can overpower your entire Reich with its world-class military. They even take over regions that have a slave population of literally zero, and they shred the GDP of every area they took over so that your playthrough-long efforts to fix the economy are immediately cancelled out.
This really sucks, you might think. I’m feeling pretty indignant, so how about we crush the slave revolt and just go full evil dictator mode? You can’t, the game won’t let you. Your goal is to negotiate with the slaves and not fight them. Instead, the German Army in Muscovy revolts and wants to enact Total Slave Death. You have to invade THEM and defeat your own army that’s just trying to do its job, and you have to do it before the timer ticks down and they launch their invasion of the slave lands. If they launch it, then you lose the game and are locked in a failstate. So you have to kill your own army and condescend to parlay with the slaves, and if the negotiations fail, you’re also locked in a failstate. The AI can’t do this on its own so they had to implement special game rules where the AI can pass this crisis automatically, or else they’d always fail.
The slave revolt is as railroaded as TNO gets. They envision a very particular image of you as an evil slavedriver and they want the glorious socialist Spartacus slave revolt where The PeopleTM save the day even though you were literally months away from solving all their grievances already. I think they wanted to drive home this point that you’re really just as bad as the old Nazis and you’re just putting on a fresh coat of paint, but this whole plotline was executed really terribly and just leaves a bad taste in most players’ mouths. It’s also bizarre given TNO’s complicated relationship with Nazis and penchant for giving certain ones redemption arcs. PinkPanzer had an idea in his head of how he wanted the story to end, but he didn’t think about how he’d actually get there or how much player agency he’d have to destroy. The slave revolt is the worst example of this, but there’s plenty of other instances scattered throughout the mod.
ANGRY TANGENT RANT CONCLUDED, CARRY ON.
The Rework Curse and Terminal Realism Syndrome
TNO at launch was a very stupid mod. It still is, but for different reasons. Long before it was even a conceptual Victoria II mod, it was a text-based role-play game on the Facepunch forum. It was PinkPanzer’s brainchild, a Frankenstein’s monster of all the various alternate history ideas and tropes he could think of cobbled together. As a Nazi-turned-tankie, he had some very extreme and conflicting views on such a sensitive and controversial subject as WWII alternate history, and the result was a very pulpy, sensational mod. Old school TNO is very bombastic in its tone and wants to shock you with tales of appalling violence and extremism. I also think it reflects a part of Panzer’s Stormfront past and any fond memories he may or may not have had.
Old school TNO had a central narrative that tied the entire mod together, and the solution to that conflict is Nazi redemption. Nazi Germany wins WWII, but the Schutzstaffel doesn’t think Hitler went far enough in achieving the Aryan dream or whatever. So they launch a coup while Germany is busy fighting the rump Red Army back in the 50s, and it fails. Instead of executing the putschists or even imprisoning them, evil retarded dumb-dumb Hitler (who is a poopyhead) slaps Himmler on the wrist by giving the SS their own fiefdom in western Europe where they can do whatever they want. It’s called the SS-Ordenstaat Burgund, or just Burgundy, and it’s less of a country and more of a concentration camp with a state. It’s also a shadow state that extends into Germany, because even though Hitler’s solution to the SS coup was to deport the SS to their own country, he still let the SS exist in Germany anyway as a legal paramilitary organization (???) and they function as a subversive force that’s trying to overthrow the state.
At the start of the game, Burgundy develops its own nuclear arsenal and embarks on a plan to destroy the world. They are so enraged by the mere existence of non-Aryans that they want to nuke the entire world. Their reasoning is that Aryans are so superior that they will survive the nuclear war and nobody else will. So their first goal is to achieve victory within Germany by backing Reinhard Heydrich as a candidate to succeed Hitler as Fuhrer. If they win, they can just take control of Germany, and then: bombs away. If that fails, their contingency is to act as a super secretive shadow organization that infiltrates the entire planet and subtly pushes the great powers towards nuclear war. One of the original goals of the game as Germany is to uncover this conspiracy and unmask it before they can get too far. Unfortunately, Burgundy’s systems lagged the game like shit and it got removed almost immediately after release, so Burgundy stopped being an actual threat and was just downgraded to a theoretical narrative threat.
He can still pose a threat if Heydrich wins the civil war, however (because millions of Germans decided it was cool to die so that one of four almost identical German Nazi bureaucrats can succeed Hitler as the next top Nazi bureaucrat). In that case, Heydrich suddenly realizes that Himmler wants to destroy the world and comes up with a plan to save it. Germany collapses ultra-hard because of course it does, and Heydrich has to make an Avengers-style coalition of various subversive resistance groups to team up against Himmler and ruin his plans before he can acquire enough missile siloes to launch them all. This coalition includes liberal student protestors, Jewish revolutionaries, Belarusian fascist partisans, and some other nonsensical members. Panzer literally described them as “the Avengers” in dev conversations. Keep in mind that IRL Heydrich was considered one of the most ruthless Nazi executioners in the entire regime. He was “the man with the iron heart.” Panzer just really liked the idea of a Nazi redemption arc.
If Heydrich loses, the world is destroyed. If its a tie and both sides get equal numbers of missiles, only Germany is destroyed. Literal black spot on the map.
After winning the war, Heydrich feels so guilty about being an evil Nazi that he blows his brains out. Then the third German civil war in a 5 year timespan occurs, and both sides are failstates so your run is over no matter who wins. There’s a lot of stuff like that in this mod. There are several paths that are violent KillRapers just to be evil violent KillRapers, not even necessarily for ideological reasons. And also several suicide quest revenge playthroughs whose only purpose is to cause as much suffering to Germans as possible before your game ends (Kovner’s genocidal revenge forces and the Black League in Omsk). They’ve tried to post-hoc justify it by saying “it's a cautionary tale about the cycle of revenge,” but it definitely feels more like anti-German revenge porn. For what it’s worth, I don’t want anti-anyone revenge porn. I just want a cool game where you command troops in an epic war.
Emblematic of the Heydrich playthrough’s “Nazis are bad guys but there’s even worse Nazis that are more bad than them” is old school TNO’s decision to have two different Nazi ideologies, both with their own compliments of sub-ideologies. In TNO, you have National Socialism and “Burgundian System” as two types. Panzer must have liked this idea, since he came up with it, but all the other devs hated it. They later renamed BurgSys to “Esoteric Nazism,” with BurgSys as a sub-ideology of it, and eventually abolished it altogether and made all the EsoNaz stuff just sub-ideologies of Nazism. I understand the decision, but I do think it kind of cheapens the weight a little bit. In real life, when extreme ideologies find some geopolitical success, they usually get watered down a bit over time, and some extreme crazy variant of it shows up claiming to be the true solution. It’s kind of like the relatively mild socialism of Brezhnev’s USSR compared with its absolutely insane counterpart in Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
More than just the Burgundian System, Burgundy itself has been continuously nerfed and shrank over the course of the game. There is an explicitly-stated endgoal by the developers to remove Burgundy entirely at some point in the future, once they can accomplish the mythical “Germany rework.” This rework has been proposed and reworked and reworked again without any concrete steps towards actually achieving it over a course of three or four years. Other countries are starving for playable content and get none, because the developers are so obsessed with trying to rework the existing content. In the end, one of two things happens: the first, and most often course of action is to add nothing at all. The second course is to add more content for the United States, especially if it can either make the country more left-wing or can nag the player about American imperialism.
One of the main reasons for these endless rework loops is the Ship of Theseus again. The mod got most of its work done when Panzer was the lead. But he hated HoI4 and eventually grew to hate TNO itself by the time he was done with it, and left the dev team as soon as the mod was first released. When he was in charge, TNO had a concrete vision and was moving in specific directions at the behest of their dictatorial leader. Without him, the mod lost direction and started going in circles. Each and every country is developed by its own team, and those teams all have different ideas on what the mod should look like as a whole, without regard for the other teams. What’s more, these teams lose members and gain new ones, and the new head is always going to have a wildly different idea and will scrap everything in favor of his favorite pet project. Lore is constantly changing, reworks are constantly in progress, and no work ever gets done. The skeleton content for RK Moskowien has changed so many times, that region looks completely different with every single update. But if you saw the leaked content for what the original version of RK Moskowien would have looked like, you’d understand why it had to be scrapped.
The one consistent thing about post-Panzer TNO is its much less exciting outlook on basically everything. They’ve doubled down on historical determinism and basically want to change everything into a boring slog. Fun, whacky details get removed and watered down. Several playable countries have been straight-up axed from the game, either replaced with skeleton content that the player can’t interact with or just a dummy country that only exists to get conquered by someone else. Almost all new content is flavor and economy stuff, yet another addition to America, or adds countries that—I’m sorry to say this—nobody wanted to play as in a German victory Cold War mod. People want to play as Nazi Germany or as countries that can challenge Nazi Germany. They don’t want to play as Mexico or Brazil. There’s a time and a place for cool historical stuff involving Mexico. The 60s and 70s just aren’t really that time.
And it’s a moot point, because you can’t actually challenge Germany in this mod. Challenging them would lead to a nuclear war, which the game prevents. Instead you just have to watch them slowly decline with the assurance that they’ll implode on themselves sometime in the early 80s, because that’s what the forces of history dictate. Too bad you can’t actually play as those forces of history.
Old school TNO is a grimdark mod that wants to shock you into reaching the incredible conclusion that Nazis are bad. New TNO is “Nothing Ever Happens: the mod.”
TNO and the Royal Martyrs
If you would spare me a moment (you’ve probably spared me about an hour already), I have a hobby horse I’m going to get on for a moment here. If you aren’t interested, skip to the next section.
TNO has a weird relationship with Russia and especially with Russian Orthodoxy. Russia is this schroedinger’s cat of a country, where it’s the good guys because they were brave communists and the bad guys because they’re evil Putinists and Tsarists. The Russian Orthodox Church is simultaneously a beloved Christian institution and we need to respect the free worship of religion, and an evil reactionary enslaving force that wants to plunge the world back into the dark ages. Nowhere is this seen more than in TNO’s warlord faction of the Komi Republic.
Komi is the pet project of a TNO dev named Pacifica, another transsexual who was lead dev for some time. He (his name is Frederick, dude, you gotta be real with yourself) envisioned Komi as this complicated house of cards faction that would be the centerpiece of some epic political thriller show on HBO Max. It takes itself way too seriously in its depiction of high-stakes corrupt democratic politics in this frozen shithole rump state of a rump state of a rump state with less than 200,000 inhabitants and little to no industry. Basically, there’s a democratic republic in between the German frontier and the Urals, one of a dozen Russian warlords, and they’re reaching a tipping point with their politics. Most warlord factions in this game have two or three potential political paths you can go down. Komi has twelve, and they’re all extremely different. You’d think that with so many paths, they wouldn’t have the time to flesh them out, but they did because Pacifica made it his autistic pet project. That’s okay, I have my own autistic pet projects.
One of these paths in particular gets more attention than the others. It was supposed to be a secret easter egg path, but was so out there that it captivated the community and is now one of the most well-known facets of the entire mod. Sergei Taboritsky is an obscure White Russian emigre who, in real life, assassinated a minor Russian liberal figure and translated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion from Russian into German. In-game, he is the leader of Komi’s monarchist faction. He doesn’t want some random Romanov cousin to sit on the throne, however. He is convinced that the Tsarevich Alexis is still alive and in hiding, and that he will return to rule Russia as a kind of god-emperor if only Taboritsky can purify the land for him. The result is the most comically over the top evil faction in TNO, and that’s including Burgundy and the Afrikaner Reichstaat (whose goal is explicitly to kill all black people). Taboritsky’s Holy Russian Empire wants to kill everyone. You die there just from breathing the wrong way. And they kill people with VX gas so you know they’re super ultra-evil. Taboritsky is also ethnically Jewish but lied about being a Baltic German nobleman to hide this when he lived in Nazi Germany, so there’s a heavily played-up self-hating Jew angle here.
The scenario ends when the Holy Russian Empire collapses. There is no way to prevent it. It will always happen, and when it does, Russia will descend into apocalyptic levels of anarchy and devastation from which it will never recover. One of the big problems with TNO is its many failstates, which are easily attained and lock you out of playing more content. You get easily punished for clicking the wrong things this way. But Taboritsky’s failstate is perhaps the only interesting one to explore, with its whole new suite of warlords. They aren’t playable, but it’s as interesting to look at as your whole united country would be at the end of any other warlord playthrough. United or broken, either way the game won’t let you actually take the fight to Germany to take back Moscow.
I’ll touch on how autistic and annoying the TNO fandom is later, but it’s especially bad whenever Taboritsky is involved. And it presents an inaccurate image of the Russian Orthodox attitude towards the Royal Martyrs that too many players latch onto. Orthodoxy in this mod is always portrayed as either a socially liberal force that loves socialism as much as the next guy or an evil KillRaper religion that wants to destroy everything. Just like how the civil rights issues in this mod reflect the American civil rights question, its depiction of religion reflects liberal American attitudes toward the subject. Every church in this mod is either the good guy Episcopal church with its lesbian bishops, or it’s the Westboro Baptist Church that wants everyone to burn.
The Royal Martyrs are a controversial subject within Orthodox Christianity. Most people on earth probably despise these figures and believe they deserved to be murdered, but Orthodox Christians hold them in high regard. We venerate them as saints, alive in Heaven, and there is a special role that St. Nicholas of Russia and his family hold as the last rulers of the last Orthodox Christian empire. St. Alexis is not a meme figure, and Orthodox Christians aren’t Warhammer 40k cultists. It’s very annoying when you’re trying to find an Orthodox Christian hymn on YouTube and the comments section is polluted with annoying comments because that particular hymn was used in some Taboritsky cursed grimdark map edit video.
SECOND TANGENT RANT OVER. Pardon the interruptions.
TNOredux and the Axis of Evil
I laid out my grievances with TNO. I’m not alone in sharing these—you’ll find a lot of people on /vst/ (4chan’s strategy games discussion board) who would agree with my assertions. Clearly people didn’t like the direction TNO was going, and Kaiserredux provided an inspiring example. Why not just make your own mod? You could have TNO with all the polish, but none of the political proselytizing or gameplay railroading that dampens the experience.
Now I don’t remember all of the details here, and I’m sure I’m going to get some wrong. There’s so much retarded Discord drama involving github leaks and who groomed who (it’s Discord, so take a guess), and I don’t remember all of it. So take this with a grain of salt, but it goes something like this.
TNO isn’t just a mod for self-righteous Americans with a complex about African-Americans. It’s actually very popular in Russia and China, which makes sense; everyone likes underdog stories, and TNO provides a compelling story about both China and Russia as underdog countries trying to claw their way up from their despairing, defeated state. Both the Russian and Chinese TNO communities had their own submods and subcultures that differed from English-language TNO.
Tensions came to a head in 2021, when Russian translators were tasked with translating pro-homosexual content into Russian, and the RU-TNO community split off after that. The rift didn’t immediately cause conflict, until a Russian developer leaked the face reveal of lead dev Pacifica, proving that he was, in fact, a biological man, not a woman as he had hitherto claimed. Under Pacifica’s direction, the leftist, transsexual TNO devs responded by purging a third of their own dev team and scrapped basically all the work for the upcoming Europas Narben update which was slated to come out very soon. This update would have given playable content to German-occupied Eastern Europe. Three years later, none of that content has come out except for about 3 in-game years of Ukraine gameplay (by comparison, a normal TNO game is supposed to last for 10-12 in-game years). TNO development was paralyzed by a revolving door of developers who would quickly get purged alongside any work they may have accomplished, while a parallel sphere was developing in the TNO community.
In the meantime, there was a lot of trolling and raiding. Russian fascist trolls organized a group called the “Sons of Rodzaevsky,” named after the leader of the Russian fascist warlord faction in-game. The Sons nuked the TNO wiki, which had to be taken down. Only within the last year or two have they made a new one, and the main repository of TNO information continues to be the TVtropes article. Further Russian attacks leaked much of the mod’s upcoming content and exposed how terrible it was. The long-awaited Toolbox Theory update was revealed to be a shame and 80% of their progress was scrapped, delaying the update for another year (TT was supposed to be the first major update for the mod. This mod came out in late 2019 and TT didn’t come out until 2022). There were many raids on the reddit and Discord, and three sort of “anti-TNO” mascots emerged: Sergei Taboritsky, whom I mentioned earlier, Oskar Dirlewanger, commander of the 36th SS Division and generally depraved war criminal, and Sneed from Sneed’s Feed & Seed.
In general, the valve was kind of set loose and a lot of people finally started expressing how they really felt about TNO’s gameplay restrictions and plot contrivances. A lot of good, honest discussion was had on /vst/ about the state of the game and Paradox in general, and it was finally safe to say the HoI4 community’s darling mod wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The emperor had no clothes. Meanwhile the Sons of Rodzaevsky kept upping the ante on their attacks, and the TNO devs panicked with more sweeping purges and wholesale deletions of in-progress content.
Even before the mod released, there was paranoia and mass purges. Development for India, which was 90% complete before release, was scrapped after the single man working on India content got fired. To this day, India—originally supposed to be one of the most important and dynamic countries in the mod—does not have any playable content. Of course, this content was retarded stuff like Lord Mountbatten commanding a genocidal cannibal band of stranded British soldiers who burn Indian children alive for fun and then eat them. So we aren’t exactly missing out on much. Romanian content was scrapped because Panzer thought the Romanian dev team was conspiring against him. Free France had an overzealous right-wing dev who designed not one, but four different monarchist France focus trees, so he naturally got caught in the crossfires as a politically-suspect individual. The mod was never going to release at all until Panzer scrapped most of the content so only the superpowers, Italy, Burgundy, Russian warlords, China, and British Isles were playable at release. And that was after cutting the timeframe of the game in half from 20 years to 10 years. This means that Russia will never get to take back Moscow, nor will China ever cast off the Japanese yoke.
The TNO devs had a single, publicly-accessible google spreadsheet containing all their contact information, and naturally it got leaked. You’d think the people who were obsessed with the phantom threat of Nazis infiltrating their mod team would have better opsec. TNO devs freaked out, lied and said there weren’t purges, and then threatened to call the FBI on the Russians.
One of the funniest things from the leaked documents, by the way, were logs that revealed Panzer basically never did any development and just directed his unpaid volunteer modders as a slavedriver. Pacifica, the new head dev after Panzer left, was similarly criticized for wasting all of his time on his Taboritsky side project while ignoring the rest of the scheduled workload. This TNO episode climaxed with the departure of Pacifica, who begged Panzer to return to the dev team. Panzer, who by then utterly hated his own creation, refused to accept the gutter crown and deleted the entire TNO github repository.
It was over. Basically all progress made on the mod’s development since release was lost, and everything that’s come out afterward was after they started again from scratch in late 2021. There is a very, very hard break between 2019 TNO and the mod that picked up its pieces and sewed them back together. I was understating things earlier on when I described this as a Ship of Theseus. It’s more like if the ship crashed on the sirens’ rocks and was totally rent into pieces, and then a different shipwrecked crew came up and took those pieces and incorporated them into their own new ship.
For those of you who are Fallout fans, this whole thing was happening at the same time as the Fallout: the Frontier drama. 2021 was something of a nadir for autistic internet fandoms.
TNO Redux
At first there was a single unified TNOredux in development. This was more like Kaiserredux in that it was a reddit-based alternative to TNO that would have simply allowed for more whacky, open-ended gameplay. It was not explicitly political, but there were plenty of Russians and rightists participating, because clearly TNO wasn’t interested in harboring them. The TNO devs cracked down hard on anyone and anything to do with TNOredux, and the initial effort was pretty much killed in the water. Further efforts were picked up by various different groups after that.
4chan’s /vst/ board picked up immediately where the original TNOredux had left off. This time, it was going to be an explicitly right-wing mod to challenge TNO’s overt leftism. At the same time, there was also a reddit-driven TNOredux, which we’ll call Redditx for clarity’s sake. I’m not going to dwell too long on Redditx, but digging through my old notes I found this story and it was too funny to share:
Redditx’s whole shtick was appeasement. While 4chanx doubled down on the slavophile racism, Redditx wanted to prove to the TNO people that they were good guys who didn’t hate democracy or gay black people, and that they would never ever ever ever never be transphobic. TNO, of course, hated them anyway. After some stupid Discord drama, Redditx’s development team got taken over by a Romanian man who went by the username TheBluePanzer (because ThePinkPanzer is such a paragon worth emulating). The whole drama from earlier on involving RU-TNO was covered by this Latvian YouTuber named Slackjawed, who sympathized with the 4chan people. I think it was some kind of KiwiFarms thing.
Some guys on Slackjawed’s Discord faked a bunch of screenshots and fabricated other materials to fool BluePanzer into thinking Slackjawed was a pedo groomer and got him to fly to Latvia to confront him in person. BluePanzer takes the bait, actually flies to Latvia, then finds out there is nothing there and that he was fooled. And he got stuck in Latvia because he spent all his money on the plane ticket and has no way to get back to Romania.
What did this autist expect to gain out of buying a one way ticket to Latvia with the last of his money? Did he think that he was going to arrest this guy and then get paid a bounty for it like it's the Wild West? I remember someone on /vst/ saying: “This dumbass is running around thinking real life is like GTA. He thought he could fast travel back home when he was done probably LOL”
4chan Redux and the Axis of Evil
That’s not really relevant to anything, it’s just funny LOLcow drama. Turning our attention back to 4chanx, we’ll find that sanity is at a premium here. The lead developer was a man by the name of Malkovich, an ethnic Serbian living in a Yugoslav War-era bunker in Bosnia. He was a Germanic neopagan and believed Germans were the superior master race who needed to conquer the Balkans and uplift the Slavic people by assimilating them into German culture. The only development he got done for 4chanx was a fascist Mongolia focus tree where you play as Ungarn Roman von Sternberg, who is still alive in the 1960s because of esoteric Tibetan fountain of youth magic. His goal in life? To kill Jews and liberals by running them over with his wheelchair.
Needless to say, 4chanx was an over-the-top mod and wanted to really embrace its role as the “bad guy” of the HoI4 modding scene. Both TNOreduxes went defunct pretty quickly. The reddit redux petered out, because who wants to slave away at a submod for people who hate you? 4chanredux, however, started anew as TNOredux: Axis of Evil. They started making some serious progress, and then… banned. TNO still put out a hit on them. So they started again, again. They dropped the TNO association for good and simply because Axis of Evil, then renamed to Axis of Evil: Minutes to Midnight. Malkovich didn’t offer any help and just wanted to ramble about Sternberg and trolling liberals with Dirlewanger Sneed edits, so Axis of Evil just left him behind. Maybe, somewhere out there, there’s a Bosnian bunker whose sole occupant is still toiling away at the greatest HoI4 mod of all time…
Axis of Evil was fun, but very chaotic, and filled with very angry white nationalists. It was very easy to tell who was Turkish and who was Ukrainian because they never shut up about how their race was the most superior on earth, and every single Finnish user was a complete pervert who only talked about gay sex. This was back in 2021, when it was very easy to get banned from absolutely anything online for any reason, and a lot of people on both sides of the political spectrum were kind of losing their minds as a result. If TNO had the left-wing trannies, then Axis of Evil had the right-wing trannies. There were plenty of them, and they always managed to worm their way into top development positions. The thing with HoI4 modding is that there are three types of modders: American teenagers who don’t know how to do anything and get no work done, political extremist transsexuals who get some work done but are just miserable people to interact with, and Russians and Ukrainians who get most of the work done, are fun to interact with, and are absolutely insane. You’d think you want a team of all Russians for the best result, but if you have too many of them you get Malkovich, and then no work gets done at all.
AoE also had its share of ideologues who wanted political wish-fulfillment. I remember one developer who had a bone to pick with the Russian warlord in Magadan on the Pacific coast. Magadan is actually one of the most well-written countries in TNO, it’s surprisingly fun to play, and it’s one of the only campaigns in the entire game where you can play as an intelligent fascist who’s not doomed to fail. Magadan’s whole shtick is pragmatic fascism that can successfully mask itself to seem like center-right anticommunism, in order to reap the rewards of American foreign aid—which sounds exactly like something a smart Cold War-era dictator would do in real life. The AoE guy hated this though, and went on long tirades about how Magadan was a disgrace and he would change it to reflect the glory of proper Italian-style Mussolinian fascism to uplift Russia. It’s just a video game dude, calm down.
Axis of Evil got to a point where a good playable demo was nearly ready: You take control of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Chinese remnants in the mountains west of Chongqing, preparing for a surprise offensive against the Japanese collaborators. The progress looked good, it was nearly ready to experience—and then it was all gone. Infighting broke out between the far-right hardliners, the moderate right pragmatists, and the insane Nazi transsexuals. The server got taken down, the mod went bottom-up, and most of the work done on it was gone. Axis of Evil had also developed a nasty reputation by this point, and no other modders wanted to collaborate with them. The RU-TNO community, which had once held the torch for TNOredux, had long since lost interest.
Axis of Evil made a last-ditch effort and rebranded as Minutes to Midnight. These were the moderately right-wing people who didn’t want to make a political wish fulfillment mod and just wanted a Kaiserredux-style alternative to TNO, while implementing some original ideas they had come up with on the way. It was a much more laid-back atmosphere than Axis of Evil, but still decidedly more right-wing than normal TNO. Unfortunately, there was a diabolical joker at play in the hand of fate, as there oft is in the world of video game modding: trannies. More neo-Nazi trannies infiltrated the dev team and the downfall of Axis of Evil played out all over again as the MTM devs tried to contain the spread. When it went down, it went down for good, and no serious attempt to provide a TNO alternative was ever made.
Index
This is Part 3 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
Every problem on the modern internet always comes back to troons. This has been a fun read
I was going to mention the tno drama and even the close proximity that it happened to when the fallout the frontier drama happened. This short period was one of the funniest series of events I’ve ever seen. Everyone could see it coming with a mod like tno, but second desert provided by ftf made the whole thing so much sweeter. Legendary meme era, you really just had to be there.
Tno was successful with nothing except aesthetics, which completely carried them. The Taboritsky aesthetic, the burgundy aesthetic, etc were all really cool and stood out. It’s really a shame the cool events, portraits, and music were just a mask for the dogshit content.