Hearts of Iron IV: Toozer Mods

In Part 4 of the HoI4 series, we examine a few case studies of the cancer that is HoI4 modding after TNO.

But if patriotic sentiment is wanted,
I’ve patriotic ballads cut and dried;
For where’er our country’s banner may be planted,
All other local banners are defied!
Our warriors, in serried ranks assembled,
Never quail—or they conceal it if they do—
And I shouldn’t be surprised if nations trembled
Before the mighty troops, the troops of Titipu!

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Introduction

Hello, and welcome back to the HoI4 modding series. We’re reaching the end here. If you missed the first three parts, you can check them out by following the links at the bottom of the page.

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Toozer Mods

Somewhat contemporaneous to the development of TNO is what /vst/ and to a lesser extent reddit calls “toozer mods,” although people didn’t come up with that term and apply it to this type of mod until a few years after TNO’s release. I already mentioned Kaiserreich’s lengthy development cycle and the 5-year development of TNO only for it to be released as a skeleton of its pre-purge self. But at least these mods came out, and at least they got updates. Most mods never get this far, and all they do is post a few teasers before petering out. Most mods never even post impressive teasers that actually show you anything about the game, they just do a few leader portraits (always drawn in the TNO style) and call it a day.

The reason these mods never come out is because they don’t have any people who do actual work. They basically just have one “ideas guy” who thinks up a scenario, says “this would be really cool if there was a HoI4 mod about it,” then posts a “now recruiting” announcement on the /r/hoi4modding subreddit. What he’s really saying is “someone please make this mod for me for free.” The sad part is that PinkPanzer actually got away with this and basically set a horrible precedent for the modding community. I can’t entirely blame them, because autistic teenagers aren’t exactly known for their organizational and recruiting skills, or for many skills at all for that matter. And the pool of people you can potentially recruit from is limited by size and quality—see what I said in the previous article about the three types of HoI4 modders.

As for /r/hoi4modding: this is the nexus of HoI4 mod activity, unless you want to get involved in discord modding drama several times worse than what you just read earlier or lurk on /vst/ where everyone’s still arguing if boomer gookclicker RTS is better or worse than newfag chud HoI4 and that one guy won’t stop posting threads asking if there are any strategy games where your leader can acquire a harem. That is to say, if you want news on upcoming HoI4 modding in general, this is the main place you’ll find it. It’s also the main place you’ll find a lot of terrible, terrible unoriginal mods that will never come out. I’m going to bring up a few specific mods here as case studies to show you what I mean.

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Bring the War Home

Flashback to 2019, when TNO isn’t even out yet and Kaiserreich is the king of the modding scene. So far, you think the coolest, most intricate civil war possible is Kaiserreich’s Second American Civil War. Five unique factions all fighting each other at once? That’s crazy! Then you check the HoI4 subreddit and see this teaser. That’s eighteen different factions at once, in only three states! Imagine what secrets the rest of the country must hold! This doesn’t look impressive at all by modern HoI4 modding standards, but for 2019 this was incredible. No one had ever done it before.

I think the success of mods like Kaiserredux and Old World Blues, combined with the political trauma of January 6th (this sounds ridiculous to say but I think it did actually play a role) made American collapse scenarios a hot topic. You see a lot of hot topic stuff in HoI4 modding. Half the time you see new mod teasers on /r/hoi4modding, they’re for current event countries like Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, and Palestine. Even for big mods like TNO, this is the case. People have the attention span of a goldfish and they want to play a HoI4 mod about the latest thing the news made them get morally outraged over. And most HoI4 players are American, so they really want to enact their preferred political fantasy in-game and imagine they’re saving the country from itself. The problem is that America is a massive country with a lot of different moving parts that don’t really like each other, and making a plausible and playable American collapse scenario is massive undertaking, unlike making a focus tree for Ukraine. The HoI4 community is wary of American collapse mods now, but back in 2019, it was a daring and novel concept. Bring the War Home looked like it could have been the best mod ever.

It was actually the trooniest mod ever. Actually, it was the most non-existent mod ever, because it never came out and never will. Bring the War Home was a planned HoI4 mod set in an alternate 1960s where the USA collapses into a chaotic civil war. There’s a primary conflict between an authoritarian, racist federal rump government in Denver and a revolutionary coalition that starts out in San Francisco, but as the game progresses, it spirals out of control and you get total clusterfucks like what you see above.

For my Fallen Continent readers, this doesn’t look unlike my Fallen Continent map. And some of those factions actually share the same names with some of the ones in Fallen Continent’s California! What gives? Well, “North Bay Revolutionary Committee” rings pretty well for a socialist faction, and I liked the name. And “Stonewall Nation” was too silly of a meme faction for me to pass up. BTWH is a dead mod, so I feel no qualms about lifting some names from it. This mod has been defunct for years, so I borrowed the names.

But enough about me. How did this mod go defunct in the first place? The answer lies in extreme left-wing politics. TNO is left-wing, but in a “we officially denounce all forms of extremism, and by this we mean everyone needs to be some kind of liberal or democratic socialist” kind of way. They assume they’re on the right side of history and snidely remind you of it at every turn. BTWH was different. They were openly, extremely left-wing and proud of it. This was pretty explicitly a mod for leftists who wanted to fantasize about defeating the evil racist establishment and creating a socialist utopia in America. The right-wing factions exist pretty much only to be knocked down by the good guys. They even made a big show about how no neo-Nazism would feature in their mod even as villains. They didn’t want to “validate neo-Nazis” by giving them a playable faction in this mod, even though the 1960s was the start of the American extreme right with figures like George Lincoln Rockwell and William Luther Pierce.

It didn’t really matter, because development was extremely slow and updates were few and far between. Any announcements or teasers were extremely lackluster compared to the original “Burning California” teaser, and for a year the mod slogged on in this way. Then 2020 happened, and the world really went crazy. The lead developer, a transsexual anarchist named “Laura,” joined the CHAZ commune in Washington (this guy’s name obviously isn’t Laura but that’s the only name I have to go off of) and I think he considered himself a high-ranking figure. Laura got in trouble for some kind of sexual misconduct over in CHAZ and promptly ACKed himself with guilt. Shockingly, his father was a lurker on /pol/ and told his side of the story. Later on, some eggheads from /vst/ picked this up and realized that the CHAZ ACKer was the same “Laura” who was developing BTWH. That’ll pretty much kill any development your mod may have had going forward.

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Exordium: A Diadem of 52 Stars

Not all the cringey mods are from reddit. Some of them are from /vst/, and including what I hold to be the cringiest of them all. This mod was another one-man band that never went anywhere, but he put out some visually impressive teasers and really tried to shill his project on the /vst/ HoI4 modding threads. Unfortunately, visual flair can’t save a fundamentally poor concept with awful writing.

He made the USA’s map color dark blue instead of light blue, so that’s how you know they’re evil bad guys.

I don’t think you can read this massive, massive text dump easily on your phones, so I’ll summarize what you need to know. The year is 2030, and the evil fascist Tucker Carlson is President of the USA, carrying on the hateful legacy of Donald Trump and Nick Fuentes. His plan? Kill the evil gooks. You can pretty much pinpoint the exact two-week period in which this toozer came out, thanks to the #StopAsianHate hashtag at the bottom. I have to share this text from the “Anti-Asiatic Hate” modifier. Not all of it, because it would double the length of this article, but the last few sentences always get me keking:

Take a stroll over to your nearest stand-up comedy club and you’ll see some Louis C.K.-wannabe tell jokes about how his new co-worker Cho Chang chopstick-whipped her boys for not getting an A+ on their math exam. Listen to the voracious laughter, then turn around, and see their faces. It’s just a joke to them. Hate is just a joke to America. Always has been.

This guy was actually worried that Tucker Carlson would become President in 2024 and gas all the Chinese, and then Nick Fuentes would follow him up in 2032 to enslave all women. It seems like this guy gets really scared of right-wing media talking heads and assumes that the talking heads themselves make all the decisions and enact all the policies. It’s like the political version of not understanding object permanence. He probably thinks that Vaush could fix the country if he was elected president, and that if there was an American collapse the battle lines would be drawn around internet celebrity cliques. If this mod has an American Civil War in it, I guarantee you it would include some shit like “the Red Catgirl Brigades” and some kind of Nick Fuentes Groyper army.

It’s not just his writing that’s awful. Take a look at his world map, and you’ll see nearly every single stale alternate history trope conceivable:

We’ve got, in the 21st Century:

• Different sides with the World War. Somehow Japan wins against USA but Germany still loses

• Really random Point of Divergence (survival of the Brazilian Empire) that doesn’t seem to affect anything in the actual lore

• Imperialist USA that takes over stuff but not Hawaii and also gives Indians extra autonomy for some reason

• Mayan LARP country in Central America

• Incan LARP country in South America

• Surviving USSR

• Surviving Empire of Japan

• Britain loses Northern Ireland and nixes the St. Patrick’s Saltire from their flag

• Big Germany with Austria

• Belgium partitioned by France and the Netherlands

• Monarchist LARP countries in Europe

• Surviving Czechoslovakia

• Surviving Yugoslavia

• Pan-African union in West Africa

• Apartheid South Africa

• Asian countries the same but with weird new names

• Reddit-tier trendy flag design according to “correct” (self-declared correct) vexillological principles

• Ideology-wank country naming where everything is “the Free Democratic Federative Republic of the United Adjectives”

• Like seven different ISIS factions

• The teaser also advertises the “breadcraft” minecraft server, which I assume is some kind of lefty BreadTube thing

Bear in mind that this is the improved, toned-down version of the Exordium map. There’s an earlier version of this map where the fucking Carthaginian Empire still exists in 2020. Somehow history changed so that the Carthaginian civilization still existed for thousands of years, but it’s similar enough so that America has almost the exact same suite of politicians and the countries are still fighting the same trendy conflicts that geopolitics YouTubers make videos about. It’s kind of like the movie Bright, where you have this crazy fantasy world with wizards and Orcs and Elves, but also the American demographic situation looks exactly the same in 2017, just with an extra neighborhood in L.A. for Orcs right next to the Chicanos, and no historical events ever occurred differently than they did in real life.

Brought to you by the good people at Netflix.

I would describe this as backwards alternate history design. What this guy has done is create a scenario that has a bunch of cool stuff in it (or at least stuff he thinks is cool), but he has to work his way backward and design a timeline that allows for these things to happen. The result is a really contrived scenario that feels more like a checklist of alt history tropes. A more robust way to craft alternate history settings is to take a historical event or development, change it, and then explore the ramifications and ripple effects from there. A really good example of this is this Aevum Lupi Bicipitis map, in which St. Luke becomes the first Bishop of Rome after St. Peter dies really early on in Cyprus. This changes the structure of the Christian Church, which means its relationship with the Roman and post-Roman state(s) is completely different, which leads to a totally unrecognizable European continent after a thousand years.

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The Iron Dream

If we want to talk about contrived, checklist alternate history scenarios, the recent toozer mod of the month on /r/hoi4modding is one of the most egregious offenders I’ve ever seen. Let’s just take a look at the three toozers this guy has posted and go down the checklist.

Starting with the California teaser, we have:

• California Republic ripped off from Fallout: New Vegas.

• Las Vegas Strip ripped off from Fallout: New Vegas.

• Area 51 meme faction (Nevada’s always got to have a meme faction for some reason) that’s probably also a Fallout: New Vegas reference.

• Utah National Guard is in Nevada for some reason.

• Northern California is communist while the south is right-wing.

• Gus Hall, a meme leader nobody cared about until he showed up as a presidential candidate in TNO.

• Subideology names directly lifted from TNO.

• Silicon Valley techno-LARP faction, which is dumb enough on its own, but also reflects a problem where HoI4 modders try to retroactively apply modern technology and modern attitudes towards technology into past time periods. This mod is supposed to take place in the 1960s, when computers were obscure, extremely expensive, and filled several rooms, all with less calculating power than a modern TI-84. If you were an American in a 1960s Civil War, what does this computer nerd have to offer you to join his techno-warlord empire? Why not just fight for one of the normal factions, or a different extremist faction that actually has something to offer you?

• Missing localization text that could have been very easily fixed, showing that the developer is just plain lazy.

For America as a whole, which is low-res enough that I really can’t tell what’s going on:

• Colorado Command Center is in Arizona, not Colorado, and Colorado has its own command center anyway.

• Come to think of it, why are there like seven military factions all next to each other? Don’t you think they would either work together, or else there’d be some more ideological variety?

• Most of the country is extremely instable and collapsing except for the arbitrary midwestern blob that stretches across half the continent.

• I can’t quite tell for sure but it looks like Oklahoma’s 5% Native American population managed to commandeer half the state for an Indian LARP faction.

• Faction with “Aryan” in the name.

• Provisional Ideological LARP Republic of the Free Adjectives.

• Republic of Texas.

• Cascadia.

• Random independent state governments that the developer didn’t want to do anything in or else ran out of ideas. Probably 50% of them get magically coup’d by some insane cult faction who just took over the entire State of Kentucky one day. Cults and radical extremists with no governmental backing are definitely extremely successfully and don’t just fail pathetically.

And lastly, let’s look at Canada:

• A dozen warlords in a region where 99% of the population and infrastructure is under the control of a single faction.

• German LARP faction in an area populated by zero Germans.

• French LARP faction in an area with few Frenchmen.

• English-speaking Canada just doesn’t exist anymore, I guess, and Toronto is really cool with being ruled over by French Nazis LARPing as Bronze Age Gauls.

• Sex cult meme faction. See what I said earlier about cults. These guys are way better at killing themselves than they are killing other people and taking over things.

• Nearly half of the factions are Nazi LARP factions.

• Obligatory communist faction to try and beat the allegations that it’s a Nazi wank mod.

• Even more subideology names stolen from TNO, including EsoNaz which I’m sure they’d like to call Burgundian System if they could get away with it.

All of this is emblematic of a wider problem that I’d like to call HoI4 Brainrot. It’s closely related with the problem of ideology wank, but is less intrinsically political and more of a virus that stifles creativity and originality. We’ll take a closer look at brainrot in the next and final article of the HoI4 modding series.

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Index

This is Part 4 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