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.
That’s why I used the prima donna metaphor. Very beautiful and flashy, but extremely selfish and demanding, self-convinced of her own importance, and difficult to work with.
>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.
Lmao I actually wish that had made it into the release
Some of the scrapped Europas Narben content was ridiculous. RK Moskau was supposed to collapse into a bunch of warlords, and the obligatory BurgSys SS warlord was basically a villain from Castlevania or Silent Hill. I don’t remember the specifics, it’s just been so long, but it involved something about trying to selectively breed a new Aryan master race and subordinate Slavic slave race to serve them. Panzer’s TNO was ridiculous, in ways that are sometimes better and sometimes worse than modern “realism” TNO.
It's interkeksting how libshit media has far more objective villains than stuff from preceding eras. LOTR was made by a devout catholic and portrays the orcs as unfortunate slaves of Sauron, who's a baddie because he wants power. Star Wars, made decades before the woke movement, shows the humanity of almost all sith lords in stuff like the Clone Wars and Thrawn books. Meanwhile, TNO portrays actual real humans who had lives & existed as KillerMcRapefaces who do nothing but kill and rape and spam cp on those evil terrorist hacker sites like 4cuck and snarky snappy. Curious!
It sounds like TNO writing is what happens when an autist adopts a hyper-ideological and Manichaean outlook.
Good writers, left or right, can always identify with their subjects, including their villains. The Sopranos was made by a liberal (but yeah, not a woke/Manichaean one).
A hyper-ideological autist has two layers of inability to identify with his villains. Can't imagine good writing coming from that.
TNO writers can't empathize with anyone who dosent hold their ultra specific worldview and political views. Even plenty of more moderate conservatives in the mod are portrayed as some sort of evil that must be resisted. In the old Free British path there is a sub story about moving the conservative part way from the "thinly veiled racism" of Enoch Powell and to legalize gay marriage. A good writer and alternative historian should question why Enoch Powell would even be talking about immigration of non-whites in to the UK when it just spent almost 2 decades under a German puppet government with absolutely no non-euro immigration?
TNO is also obsessed with the hippie movement and every single country on earth has a subversive, leftist youth culture trying to stick it to “the man.” One of the best ideas Axis of Evil had was that the European youth is actually made up of extreme super-fascists, hopped up on a generation of master race propaganda. This is the Hitler Youth generation, and their greatest concern is that Hitler didn’t go far enough. One of the more developed countries before Axis of Evil fell apart was Great Britain; one of the funny bits of lore was that the Beatles were a psychedelic esoteric fascist rock band and represented a violent, extremist youth subculture that presents a challenge for the “moderate” fascist old guard currently governing Britain.
And you’re spot-on about Powell. An actual post-Nazi invasion Britain would be concerned with stuff like European trade, being disconnected with their Anglosphere cousins across the pond, and House of Peers reform. Not gay marriage and Jamaican immigrants.
Another banger. 👍 I never played TNO. If I wanted a political thriller I'd just watch House of Cards or read Tom Clancy. But I'm surprised you didn't mention A Thousand Week Reich. Some call it TNO light, but it's way better, even if it seems like a less interesting imitation of TNO at first glance. There's no fail states, you can actually defeat Germany as the US-led team, and there's no nuclear end of the world failure. My favorite factions are the Russian Republic in the Far East under Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the collaborationists turned Liberators: The Russian National Republic, which forms out of the German Reich puppet in Moscow. Overall, a fun mod. 👍
TWR is an actual wargame mod, which I like. It’s been a long time since I played, but when I played it did suffer from a similar problem to TNO where Hitler’s death causes a huge explosion of activity at the start of the midgame, which tends to fizzle out into stagnation by the lategame. That’s kind of a HoI4 problem in general though, and maybe a Paradox problem in general. Victoria II is the only game I can think of with a challenging lategame.
I like TWR lore more than TNO lore, and followed the series back when it was just a bunch of fictional maps, before it got turned into a HoI4 mod. I actually discovered TNO in the comments section of TWR teasers from people saying TNO was better (lol).
TWR is a lot cleaner than TNO, but the lead dev guy is a little kooky. He’s mixed race white/asian and is like a liberal version of Francis Fukuyama: he’s convinced that history is on a linear, deterministic trajectory that will end with liberal capitalist utopia once every single person is the same shade of brown. He said something about how governments should mandate race-mixing like it’s 19th century Paraguay (because that worked so well for Paraguay). But that’s all the dirt I got on them. They’re really a pretty normal mod, comparatively.
I think my ideal Axis victory mod would be 'WW2 extended into the 50s' rather than 'Cold War.'
Say Nazi Germany beat the Soviets but failed to conquer Britain and the Japanese won in the Pacific. Now, after a few year's lull the war restarts, with the US and Commonwealth against Germany and Japan, and everyone has nukes.
That sounds interesting, but I actually like TWR's version where Germany and Italy survive but Japan is defeated by the Americans and Chinese. Also, Russia is so much fun even if there's only a few factions most of which are different variations of Soviet.
TWR is also much more creative as well. Germany winning in the west and Japan losing to nationalist China in Asia is actually a fun idea. Plus France is actually playable.
The idea of a 1v1 Japan vs USA war that culminates in an American invasion of the Japanese home islands is fascinating to me. Definitely one of my favorite aspects of TWR lore. I was always a Pacific War nerd.
Yeah, the Pacific war and alternate possibilities around it are underappreciated. The KMT also has a lot of utapped potential for speculation so I'm glad TWR delved into it.
Yes. I love playing as the French State and joining Italy and crushing the Germans whilst playing le chant du départ in the background. Vive le France! ✊🏻
Unironically agree. NATO should've been more focused on Sub-Sahara Africa and while we're at it give full support to Rhodesia and South Africa and maybe even combine them to create a South African Federation. But they would never have done that sadly, they were too cucked. OFN is everything NATO wishes it was.
Hilarious read. I wanted to enjoy TNO but didn't. You hit the nail on the head, the politics and world building are often inane and don't really make sense, but you'd forgive that if the gameplay was fun. Unfortunately they stripped that back in favour of... politics and world building. I did enjoy some of the Russian warlords, and remember the fanbase obsessing over the niche left wing ones.
I find the right-wing warlords to be a lot more fun to play and more narratively gripping because the devs have a bias against them. They don't get anything handed to them, but have to build up everything they have from scratch. The Russian Liberation Army in Samara starts out with zero public approval and is despised as collaborators, so every shred of public support you get feels earned.
The "Harbin Three," Magadan, Amur, and Chita, are the best warlords in the mod, IMO. Like the western collaborators, these people are hated by the populace at the start and have to earn that support (or brutally terrorize the populace into submission, if you're Rodzaevsky). Amur and Chita are probably the most character-driven stories in the mod. Everyone wants to see Tsar Mikhail make the best of his awful situation, and Amur does a surprisingly good job getting you to root for the evil dictator Rodzaevsky and see him clean up his act get wise to his underlings' schemes. Magadan is my personal favorite, because they're stuck in a frozen tundra with nothing but a port, but they exploit that port, the one single advantage they have, to get foreign aid and bring in White emigres and mercenaries.
Most of the leftist factions (except Irkutsk's Yagoda, I like him) feel boring because the game is already on your side. It just feels like the shot is already lined up for you and all you have to do is take this ten-year victory lap of inevitable triumph because, hey, you're the good guys, so enjoy it. The best non-rightist warlords are probably Sverdlovsk's Red Army remnants and reformers, Novosibirsk's corporatists and reformers, and Irkutsk's market communist pragmatists. I wanted to like Alexander Men but his path sucks, and I'll concede that there's a reason the devs nixed him. They should have fixed the path instead of removing him, but that's lazy TNO devs for you.
I don't think I ever actually played the far eastern warlords. Samara and Nobisibirsk were pretty good. I liked the Eurasianist Komi path too, as well as the Irkutsk's Soviet remnant.
Also the mod starts earlier, so it fits into the Hoi4 WW2 content better. All in all fresher ideas with less self-righteous moralizing and railroading.
Wow, what a disgustingly detailed and great article. I wish you had covered Africa more though. My favorite paths were the failstate ones and I was always very dissapointed by that. I thought Burgundy was cool, Heinrich was cool (mostly because all the SS portraits were cool) and the schizo guy in Africa is cool. Its just sad that they are all programmed to lose, the story is so laughably on the nose and that the gameplay is bad. Also Dirlewanger and the AIs which surround him are actually really fun. They should have given him more content.
Great read. I've always been keeping an eye on the hoi4 modding community since 2020 and I had not known about half of this. Will you ever go over "Red Flood"? I remember there being a lot of hype around that mod and I've recently played it but development on it is at a snails pace and it really shouldn't be. Also I know you already wrote an absurdly long article but I wish you could have spoke on the TNO: 2nd west Russian War submod. They've had lots of internal drama (teaming up with a Chinese dev team) and external drama with TNO and TFR mod with it getting deleted several times.
Red Flood just goes over the top with researching individual historical characters and creating unique and aesthetically pleasing focus trees that fit their views and vibe,
It's one of the main reasons why the development is taking so long, but I'd say that focusing on quality over quantity is generally a good move.
I really enjoy Redflood whenever I decide to play a game of it. My main gripe with its development is that (like many many other HOI4 mods) Russia gets to much more love and flavour than the rest of the map. They had 3 or so reworks on Russia despite it already have had some of the best content. It is insane what a state the USA and UK content is in. However, I won't judge them too harshly, they do all this shit for free and try and portray most ideologies the way a supporter of them would see it, barring a few extreme examples
I am writing about the things I’m familiar with. I have not played a lot of Red Flood, but did like what I experienced with that mod. I do know it’s experienced a drastic change in direction since its release, however, and that not everyone is pleased with the way things are going.
I’m also vaguely aware of the troubles of 2WRW, but don’t fully know what’s up. There was a period when people thought they would carry the torch of TNO better than TNO itself could, but it’s clear that their development cycle is just as slow as TNO’s is. After three years, we’ve got one single focus tree and a basic skeleton rig for the rest of Russia.
I’m honestly pretty disappointed by just how little the TNO submodding community has been able to put out after all these years. Kaiserreich had Kaiserredux, Kalterkrieg, Fuhrerreich, the Deutches Uberreich mod which got banned for being too edgy, and lots of smaller mods to extend the default KR experience. TNO has very little substantial submodding, by contrast, and the submods almost always get abandoned and become obsolete.
Red Flood's change in direction comes from a promise from the Dev team to abandon the old meme-y and morally charged writing, reworking the focus trees of all individual leaders to better represent their IRL views, or plausible ideological deviations that would result from a prolonged Great War. It tries to be objective.
When one mentions Red Flood in these circles you get dozens of plebs foaming at their mouth over how "cursed" and heckin "schizo" the mod is, it is incredibly annoying. That's why the changes were necessary. It now tries to faithfully depict historical figures as the complex individuals they actually were, instead of labeling them as good or evil like some nagging teacher who only sees the world in two dimensions. This of course upset the autistic countryball Jreg types, who are completely obsessed with the political compass because of its bright colours and overly simplistic, almost black and white categorizations. The devteam even removed old content like the nonsensical "1984 Goebbels" path for the German socialist republic because it was clear that it was written as a sort of jab against authoritarianism from a biased old flood developer. Now it has been replaced with an accurate representation of the leader's pre NS beliefs. Just one of many examples.
Simply put, the setting no longer turns people into caricatures.
There are however valid criticisms of the mod, mainly the fact updates are extremely scarce, since the devteam focuses on Quality over quantity. Red Flood is the mod you play for beautiful artwork and well written, dramatic narration, less so for quick action and world conquests runs. The mod is certainly lacking in regards to long term content and warfare, but there are many fun factions to play, and the general trend of big region specific updates with skeleton content for peripheral nations will continue as planned on the roadmap, which will hopefully make the mod stand out as the surrealist art project it's meant to be.
All in all it is my personal favourite mod simply for the reason that it doesn't try to railroad anything or guilt trip you for playing as a historical character that is seen as evil through the lens of modern western progressive morality.
I think the pandemic caused more people to have an absurd amount of free time to develop mods so we had a two year period of absurd mod development and now it's a trickle. I think TNO shot itself in the foot by overhauling the mod so significantly that it's extremely hard to submit. I know the 2wrw just announced they will no longer keep up with tno updates and branch off with their own development and only implement parts of TNO that fit their vision which I think is the much smarter decision
Ah, 2WRW is finally going the fan fork direction. Hopefully that will help spur on development for the mod and real work can finally get done. Good for them.
One look at the leader portraits, flags and UI of TNO makes you realize that a ton of love and attention to detail was put into the mod from an artistic standpoint alone, but neurodivergent people in modding circles act in a vain or self destructive manner like 99% of the time.
The end of TNOredux doesn't surprise me one bit, it's tragic
I'm banned from there and I don't even know why. I never posted anything in that discord. I think it was just guilt by association from the Axis of Evil days. Which is weird, because I wasn't banned when all the drama I wrote about went down, I only got banned like six months later.
Can’t tell if I lucked out or missed out by only playing exclusively multiplayer hoi4 (occasionally modded) in the days of early kaisserreich. This stuff sounds hilarious to witness even though I would have hated TNO, my group was the type to enjoy black ice or the basegame over kaisserreich type event-focused mods
My primary takeaway from this is that 4chan is even more cancerous than I thought it was and long-term 4chan use should be grounds for a compulsory psych hold and evaluation. Why did we let our entire political system get taken over by the social dynamics of two opposing porn sites (the other being Tumblr)?
Also this makes me understand much more the endless right wing (really the chan wing because our politics is just internet drama now) hysteria over trans people. None of the trans people I met on Something Awful or in real life are anything like this.
Every problem on the modern internet always comes back to troons. This has been a fun read
Thanks, I'm glad non-HoI4 readers could get something out of it.
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.
That’s why I used the prima donna metaphor. Very beautiful and flashy, but extremely selfish and demanding, self-convinced of her own importance, and difficult to work with.
>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.
Lmao I actually wish that had made it into the release
Some of the scrapped Europas Narben content was ridiculous. RK Moskau was supposed to collapse into a bunch of warlords, and the obligatory BurgSys SS warlord was basically a villain from Castlevania or Silent Hill. I don’t remember the specifics, it’s just been so long, but it involved something about trying to selectively breed a new Aryan master race and subordinate Slavic slave race to serve them. Panzer’s TNO was ridiculous, in ways that are sometimes better and sometimes worse than modern “realism” TNO.
It's interkeksting how libshit media has far more objective villains than stuff from preceding eras. LOTR was made by a devout catholic and portrays the orcs as unfortunate slaves of Sauron, who's a baddie because he wants power. Star Wars, made decades before the woke movement, shows the humanity of almost all sith lords in stuff like the Clone Wars and Thrawn books. Meanwhile, TNO portrays actual real humans who had lives & existed as KillerMcRapefaces who do nothing but kill and rape and spam cp on those evil terrorist hacker sites like 4cuck and snarky snappy. Curious!
It sounds like TNO writing is what happens when an autist adopts a hyper-ideological and Manichaean outlook.
Good writers, left or right, can always identify with their subjects, including their villains. The Sopranos was made by a liberal (but yeah, not a woke/Manichaean one).
A hyper-ideological autist has two layers of inability to identify with his villains. Can't imagine good writing coming from that.
TNO writers can't empathize with anyone who dosent hold their ultra specific worldview and political views. Even plenty of more moderate conservatives in the mod are portrayed as some sort of evil that must be resisted. In the old Free British path there is a sub story about moving the conservative part way from the "thinly veiled racism" of Enoch Powell and to legalize gay marriage. A good writer and alternative historian should question why Enoch Powell would even be talking about immigration of non-whites in to the UK when it just spent almost 2 decades under a German puppet government with absolutely no non-euro immigration?
TNO is also obsessed with the hippie movement and every single country on earth has a subversive, leftist youth culture trying to stick it to “the man.” One of the best ideas Axis of Evil had was that the European youth is actually made up of extreme super-fascists, hopped up on a generation of master race propaganda. This is the Hitler Youth generation, and their greatest concern is that Hitler didn’t go far enough. One of the more developed countries before Axis of Evil fell apart was Great Britain; one of the funny bits of lore was that the Beatles were a psychedelic esoteric fascist rock band and represented a violent, extremist youth subculture that presents a challenge for the “moderate” fascist old guard currently governing Britain.
And you’re spot-on about Powell. An actual post-Nazi invasion Britain would be concerned with stuff like European trade, being disconnected with their Anglosphere cousins across the pond, and House of Peers reform. Not gay marriage and Jamaican immigrants.
Another banger. 👍 I never played TNO. If I wanted a political thriller I'd just watch House of Cards or read Tom Clancy. But I'm surprised you didn't mention A Thousand Week Reich. Some call it TNO light, but it's way better, even if it seems like a less interesting imitation of TNO at first glance. There's no fail states, you can actually defeat Germany as the US-led team, and there's no nuclear end of the world failure. My favorite factions are the Russian Republic in the Far East under Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the collaborationists turned Liberators: The Russian National Republic, which forms out of the German Reich puppet in Moscow. Overall, a fun mod. 👍
TWR is an actual wargame mod, which I like. It’s been a long time since I played, but when I played it did suffer from a similar problem to TNO where Hitler’s death causes a huge explosion of activity at the start of the midgame, which tends to fizzle out into stagnation by the lategame. That’s kind of a HoI4 problem in general though, and maybe a Paradox problem in general. Victoria II is the only game I can think of with a challenging lategame.
I like TWR lore more than TNO lore, and followed the series back when it was just a bunch of fictional maps, before it got turned into a HoI4 mod. I actually discovered TNO in the comments section of TWR teasers from people saying TNO was better (lol).
TWR is a lot cleaner than TNO, but the lead dev guy is a little kooky. He’s mixed race white/asian and is like a liberal version of Francis Fukuyama: he’s convinced that history is on a linear, deterministic trajectory that will end with liberal capitalist utopia once every single person is the same shade of brown. He said something about how governments should mandate race-mixing like it’s 19th century Paraguay (because that worked so well for Paraguay). But that’s all the dirt I got on them. They’re really a pretty normal mod, comparatively.
I think my ideal Axis victory mod would be 'WW2 extended into the 50s' rather than 'Cold War.'
Say Nazi Germany beat the Soviets but failed to conquer Britain and the Japanese won in the Pacific. Now, after a few year's lull the war restarts, with the US and Commonwealth against Germany and Japan, and everyone has nukes.
That sounds interesting, but I actually like TWR's version where Germany and Italy survive but Japan is defeated by the Americans and Chinese. Also, Russia is so much fun even if there's only a few factions most of which are different variations of Soviet.
Yeah. Hoi4 modding seems to attract weirdos. But back to TWR, it got updated recently with America's focus tree getting a rework as well.
TWR is also much more creative as well. Germany winning in the west and Japan losing to nationalist China in Asia is actually a fun idea. Plus France is actually playable.
The idea of a 1v1 Japan vs USA war that culminates in an American invasion of the Japanese home islands is fascinating to me. Definitely one of my favorite aspects of TWR lore. I was always a Pacific War nerd.
Yeah, the Pacific war and alternate possibilities around it are underappreciated. The KMT also has a lot of utapped potential for speculation so I'm glad TWR delved into it.
Yes. I love playing as the French State and joining Italy and crushing the Germans whilst playing le chant du départ in the background. Vive le France! ✊🏻
Favourite part of TNO was turning most of the southern hemisphere into OFN police states. Nato should have done this in real life for laughs
Unironically agree. NATO should've been more focused on Sub-Sahara Africa and while we're at it give full support to Rhodesia and South Africa and maybe even combine them to create a South African Federation. But they would never have done that sadly, they were too cucked. OFN is everything NATO wishes it was.
Hilarious read. I wanted to enjoy TNO but didn't. You hit the nail on the head, the politics and world building are often inane and don't really make sense, but you'd forgive that if the gameplay was fun. Unfortunately they stripped that back in favour of... politics and world building. I did enjoy some of the Russian warlords, and remember the fanbase obsessing over the niche left wing ones.
I find the right-wing warlords to be a lot more fun to play and more narratively gripping because the devs have a bias against them. They don't get anything handed to them, but have to build up everything they have from scratch. The Russian Liberation Army in Samara starts out with zero public approval and is despised as collaborators, so every shred of public support you get feels earned.
The "Harbin Three," Magadan, Amur, and Chita, are the best warlords in the mod, IMO. Like the western collaborators, these people are hated by the populace at the start and have to earn that support (or brutally terrorize the populace into submission, if you're Rodzaevsky). Amur and Chita are probably the most character-driven stories in the mod. Everyone wants to see Tsar Mikhail make the best of his awful situation, and Amur does a surprisingly good job getting you to root for the evil dictator Rodzaevsky and see him clean up his act get wise to his underlings' schemes. Magadan is my personal favorite, because they're stuck in a frozen tundra with nothing but a port, but they exploit that port, the one single advantage they have, to get foreign aid and bring in White emigres and mercenaries.
Most of the leftist factions (except Irkutsk's Yagoda, I like him) feel boring because the game is already on your side. It just feels like the shot is already lined up for you and all you have to do is take this ten-year victory lap of inevitable triumph because, hey, you're the good guys, so enjoy it. The best non-rightist warlords are probably Sverdlovsk's Red Army remnants and reformers, Novosibirsk's corporatists and reformers, and Irkutsk's market communist pragmatists. I wanted to like Alexander Men but his path sucks, and I'll concede that there's a reason the devs nixed him. They should have fixed the path instead of removing him, but that's lazy TNO devs for you.
I don't think I ever actually played the far eastern warlords. Samara and Nobisibirsk were pretty good. I liked the Eurasianist Komi path too, as well as the Irkutsk's Soviet remnant.
Also the mod starts earlier, so it fits into the Hoi4 WW2 content better. All in all fresher ideas with less self-righteous moralizing and railroading.
Wow, what a disgustingly detailed and great article. I wish you had covered Africa more though. My favorite paths were the failstate ones and I was always very dissapointed by that. I thought Burgundy was cool, Heinrich was cool (mostly because all the SS portraits were cool) and the schizo guy in Africa is cool. Its just sad that they are all programmed to lose, the story is so laughably on the nose and that the gameplay is bad. Also Dirlewanger and the AIs which surround him are actually really fun. They should have given him more content.
The idea of just dropping hundreds of explosives across random parts of Africa to be a dick is really fucking funny
Great read. I've always been keeping an eye on the hoi4 modding community since 2020 and I had not known about half of this. Will you ever go over "Red Flood"? I remember there being a lot of hype around that mod and I've recently played it but development on it is at a snails pace and it really shouldn't be. Also I know you already wrote an absurdly long article but I wish you could have spoke on the TNO: 2nd west Russian War submod. They've had lots of internal drama (teaming up with a Chinese dev team) and external drama with TNO and TFR mod with it getting deleted several times.
Red Flood just goes over the top with researching individual historical characters and creating unique and aesthetically pleasing focus trees that fit their views and vibe,
It's one of the main reasons why the development is taking so long, but I'd say that focusing on quality over quantity is generally a good move.
I really enjoy Redflood whenever I decide to play a game of it. My main gripe with its development is that (like many many other HOI4 mods) Russia gets to much more love and flavour than the rest of the map. They had 3 or so reworks on Russia despite it already have had some of the best content. It is insane what a state the USA and UK content is in. However, I won't judge them too harshly, they do all this shit for free and try and portray most ideologies the way a supporter of them would see it, barring a few extreme examples
USA is always super half-baked and boring or it’s the most overdeveloped, rework-cursed country in the entire mod. There’s basically no in between.
Just depends if the mod is being developed by slavs or by Trans people
I am writing about the things I’m familiar with. I have not played a lot of Red Flood, but did like what I experienced with that mod. I do know it’s experienced a drastic change in direction since its release, however, and that not everyone is pleased with the way things are going.
I’m also vaguely aware of the troubles of 2WRW, but don’t fully know what’s up. There was a period when people thought they would carry the torch of TNO better than TNO itself could, but it’s clear that their development cycle is just as slow as TNO’s is. After three years, we’ve got one single focus tree and a basic skeleton rig for the rest of Russia.
I’m honestly pretty disappointed by just how little the TNO submodding community has been able to put out after all these years. Kaiserreich had Kaiserredux, Kalterkrieg, Fuhrerreich, the Deutches Uberreich mod which got banned for being too edgy, and lots of smaller mods to extend the default KR experience. TNO has very little substantial submodding, by contrast, and the submods almost always get abandoned and become obsolete.
Red Flood's change in direction comes from a promise from the Dev team to abandon the old meme-y and morally charged writing, reworking the focus trees of all individual leaders to better represent their IRL views, or plausible ideological deviations that would result from a prolonged Great War. It tries to be objective.
When one mentions Red Flood in these circles you get dozens of plebs foaming at their mouth over how "cursed" and heckin "schizo" the mod is, it is incredibly annoying. That's why the changes were necessary. It now tries to faithfully depict historical figures as the complex individuals they actually were, instead of labeling them as good or evil like some nagging teacher who only sees the world in two dimensions. This of course upset the autistic countryball Jreg types, who are completely obsessed with the political compass because of its bright colours and overly simplistic, almost black and white categorizations. The devteam even removed old content like the nonsensical "1984 Goebbels" path for the German socialist republic because it was clear that it was written as a sort of jab against authoritarianism from a biased old flood developer. Now it has been replaced with an accurate representation of the leader's pre NS beliefs. Just one of many examples.
Simply put, the setting no longer turns people into caricatures.
There are however valid criticisms of the mod, mainly the fact updates are extremely scarce, since the devteam focuses on Quality over quantity. Red Flood is the mod you play for beautiful artwork and well written, dramatic narration, less so for quick action and world conquests runs. The mod is certainly lacking in regards to long term content and warfare, but there are many fun factions to play, and the general trend of big region specific updates with skeleton content for peripheral nations will continue as planned on the roadmap, which will hopefully make the mod stand out as the surrealist art project it's meant to be.
All in all it is my personal favourite mod simply for the reason that it doesn't try to railroad anything or guilt trip you for playing as a historical character that is seen as evil through the lens of modern western progressive morality.
TNO on the other hand does exactly that.
I think the pandemic caused more people to have an absurd amount of free time to develop mods so we had a two year period of absurd mod development and now it's a trickle. I think TNO shot itself in the foot by overhauling the mod so significantly that it's extremely hard to submit. I know the 2wrw just announced they will no longer keep up with tno updates and branch off with their own development and only implement parts of TNO that fit their vision which I think is the much smarter decision
Ah, 2WRW is finally going the fan fork direction. Hopefully that will help spur on development for the mod and real work can finally get done. Good for them.
So sad that talent gets wasted on such projects.
One look at the leader portraits, flags and UI of TNO makes you realize that a ton of love and attention to detail was put into the mod from an artistic standpoint alone, but neurodivergent people in modding circles act in a vain or self destructive manner like 99% of the time.
The end of TNOredux doesn't surprise me one bit, it's tragic
Fascinating
I managed to get myself banned from the TNO discord for posting a soyjacked totenkomp
I'm banned from there and I don't even know why. I never posted anything in that discord. I think it was just guilt by association from the Axis of Evil days. Which is weird, because I wasn't banned when all the drama I wrote about went down, I only got banned like six months later.
Can’t tell if I lucked out or missed out by only playing exclusively multiplayer hoi4 (occasionally modded) in the days of early kaisserreich. This stuff sounds hilarious to witness even though I would have hated TNO, my group was the type to enjoy black ice or the basegame over kaisserreich type event-focused mods
My primary takeaway from this is that 4chan is even more cancerous than I thought it was and long-term 4chan use should be grounds for a compulsory psych hold and evaluation. Why did we let our entire political system get taken over by the social dynamics of two opposing porn sites (the other being Tumblr)?
Also this makes me understand much more the endless right wing (really the chan wing because our politics is just internet drama now) hysteria over trans people. None of the trans people I met on Something Awful or in real life are anything like this.