This is the first half of the third part (I, II) of our long-delayed series looking at Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game, easily one of the most popular historical games on the market today and thus tremendously influential in both the popular history and gaming spaces.
Over the last two parts, we took a look at the military simulation that sits at the heart of Hearts of Iron, a division-level operational simulation of World War II, along with the doctrinal framework that contextualizes what is actually happening as divisions collide along the game’s front lines. While the doctrinal system struggles to really accurately represent the different ways that armies attempted to fight in the Second World War, the overall operational simulator is a remarkable achievement. Alas, the discussion is going to turn somewhat more critical from here as we move from the operational focus of the game – where the bulk of developer time and attention have gone – to the ‘everything else’ of the game, where simplifications and streamlining often go awry.
In this part, we’re going to move upwards to the strategic level, beginning with the question of politics, particularly domestic politics. Hearts of Iron IV has an understandably more simplified approach to politics than games like Victoria II or III or even Europa Universalis V which are substantially focused on questions of how changing conditions alter the political and economic balance of a polity. Simplified, however, does not mean absent: Hearts of Iron IV does have a ‘theory of history’ when it comes to the politics of the period.
Unfortunately – and I will not bury the lede here – Hearts of Iron IV‘s simplified politics serve to present an essentially authoritarian vision of politics in which the opinion of the people matters essentially not at all, where state power can easily and effortlessly shape outcomes and where authoritarian central direction is easy, frictionless and never produces unintended results and where democracy comes effectively only with drawbacks. It is a vision of politics that begs the question1 in favor of empire and autocracy, where the only way to achieve social, cultural or political change is to first have control of the state. Governments in Hearts of Iron do not fall, they cannot be overthrown, they can only decide to abolish themselves, so absolute is authoritarian state power.
It is thus not inaccurate to say that Hearts of Iron IV‘s political model, as a result of careless simplification is fascist, in that it assumes that all politics flows down from the state, dictated by the leader and merely accepted by the people who do not exist as individuals, but merely units of state power. I do not think that the developers set out to build a fascist model of politics (indeed, I know they didn’t), but alas, despite themselves, in an effort to get the player ‘to the action’ with as little friction as possible, they have done so.
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The Dutch still managed to lose Java, but control of this area let me steadily work with a modest army to take Siam out of the war, then reclaim Dutch Indonesia and Borneo. Meanwhile, mounting IJN losses meant that the USA was actually able to support the Philippines, so by January of 1942, the war in the Pacific had already decisively shifted away from Japan.
I made the decision to remain focused on Europe, because the AI United States would have no problem defeating Japan at this point, so I kept my fleet operating in Indonesia to keep that area secure while the IJN was steadily dismantled by the USN.
Politics
On the surface, Hearts of Iron IV appears to have the components of an interesting political simulation: each country has a governing ideology along with a pie-chart of what ideologies are popular with the populace, along with stability (representing how stable the government is) and war support (reflecting how committed the populace is to the war). The problem is two-fold: none of these mechanics are very developed and none of these mechanics interact meaningfully with each other.
The system, such as it is, begins with ideology and here we run into immediate problems in representing the actual political conditions inside of most countries in the period. There are just four ideologies: democratic, communist, fascist and non-aligned. While the game does have ‘sub-ideologies’ (for instance, ‘liberalism,’ ‘conservatism,’ ‘socialism’ and ‘populism’ for democracy) these have functionally no influence on gameplay – their sum effect is to determine if your ‘same ideology’ diplomatic opinion bonus is +20 or merely +10, both numbers which in actual gameplay are either indistinguishable from zero or indistinguishable from 100, depending on what you are trying to do.2 So in practice, there are just the four ideologies.
These ideologies do matter, because the governing ideology of a country determines what actions it can take, although in practice this is just an exciting set of disabilities applied to democracies. Democracies are heavily limited in the actions they can take, particularly not being able to declare war without meeting specific conditions, with requirements that ‘world tension’ (the amount of conflict in the game) reach certain levels before they can take actions. Democracies that guarantee the independent of other countries lower world tension, which in the game mechanically is bad for them, because democracies have a lot more things (like conscription and mobilization laws) gated behind world tension. Communist, non-aligned and fascist governments largely lack these limitations and thus have much greater freedom of action to mobilize earlier (which, as we’ll see in a later post, is simply better rather than being a truly strategic choice) and attack more freely.
The idea here is to model the challenge of bringing the United States and United Kingdom onto a war footing before the war began but in practice, mechanically, democracy is simply a weaker form of government in Hearts of Iron. It is striking that no effort is made to simulate the strengths that democratic governments displayed in this period, particularly in adaptability and economic mobilization. Historically, the United Kingdom, a fraction of the size of Hitler’s continental European empire after 1940, nevertheless outproduced it in key categories like aircraft.3
The game tracks the popularity of specific ideologies in a given country with a pie-chart, but the insufficiency of this model becomes fairly obvious fairly quickly. While each country often has a unique name for each ideology, representing actual political parties in the period, divisions within an ideology are not represented. So, for instance, the United States is represented as having 99% popular ‘Democratic’ ideology. The idea here is that in Hearts of Iron IV‘s really simplified politics, the Republican and Democratic parties of 1936 are indistinguishable – both ‘Democratic’ ideology parties – and so are combined (though this is still too high – Socialist third-party candidates generally got ~2-3% in the federal elections of this period). It also strikes me as wrong – the fact that Strom Thurmond leading a ‘State’s Rights’ party (a segregationist party that probably ought to be classified at least as non-aligned given its intent to restrict the franchise) would go on to win four states in 1948 (within the game’s timeframe!) suggests that there was a meaningful constituency for a less democratic United States even in the 1940s.
Other countries suffer the same ‘party compression.’ The game has no way to distinguish in the UK between the Tories and Labour, so it doesn’t: they’re merged into a Tory (Democracy Ideology) mega-party with an unshakeable lock on politics. Pre-war Germany’s situation in 1936 are likewise simplified: the Nazi party starts with 50% popular support, while there is a chunk of Democratic ideological support (marked as Zentrum, despite the fact that the party had dissolved itself under Nazi pressure in July of 1933), communist support (the KPD) and some non-aligned. The SPD/Sopade isn’t represented at all.
Meanwhile, there is the absolute mess of the ‘non-aligned’ ideology, which encompasses non-fascist despotism, traditional absolute monarchy, quasi-democratic oligarchies, colonial dependencies and even the fractured, military-dominated political structure of the Japanese Empire. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the ‘non-aligned’ category functions as effectively a ‘grab bag’ for every country that doesn’t fit into the first three categories. In practice, the game thus largely treats ‘non-aligned’ as thus an absence of ideology: there is no way to start a global ‘non-aligned’ movement the way that democracies, fascists and communists can all create (or start with) factions aimed at promoting their ideology.
The result is a political system that simply lacks the granularity to represent politics as they existed in many countries in the period, which as we’ll see, mostly doesn’t matter for the game because this system barely matters for political change compared to the much greater influence of the focus system and political advisors. The game does have mechanics for elections, but in most of the major democracies, with all of the pro-democracy parties fused, that doesn’t mean much.
Popular ideology can change over the course of the game, but this too is extremely simplified. In practice, most countries have access to advisors they can hire (at the cost of 150 political power) who will cause popular opinion to trend towards one ideology at a rate of 0.10% per day. For some countries, getting this advisor requires completing a few national focuses (see below) to get on the right track for an ideology switch. But I want to stress how big that rate is: at +0.1 per day (the standard rate for the ‘Communist Revolutionary, Fascist Demagogue, Democratic Reformer and Staunch Monarchist advisors) a country could go from having no support at all for a given kind of government to having enough support (50%) to transition to that entirely new kind of government with little to no issues at all in less than a year and a half.
You just have to hire the right one guy. Also, this requires a government to decide to hire an advisor whose entire purpose is to undermine the government, overthrow it and in many cases presumably murder every other member of the government, but we’ll come back to that.
A similar lack of consequence assails stability and war-support as mechanics. Both stats offer bonuses when above 50% and penalties below 50% and in theory low war support can feed back into low stability which can in theory feed back into creating a political crisis. In practice, this almost never happens. War support acts as a more-or-less fixed value (it isn’t meaningfully responsive to casualties) which can be raised through war propaganda (costing political power, see below), while stability is likewise generally a fairly static value. Generally, the internal politics of states in Hearts of Iron IV are extremely stable such that the player needs to actively intervene to force political crises (sometimes a tool to intentionally change governing ideology early).
Our United Kingdom campaign comes with several examples of this sort of a-historical stability. The game requires, for instance, a bespoke event to transition from Neville Chamberlain’s government to that of Winston Churchill because the political system is both not granular enough to model the Norway Debate and subsequent vote of confidence happening as a debate within a political ideology as a result of serious policy setbacks.
Likewise, somewhat famously, support in the Wehrmacht for the invasion of France in 1940 was tepid and a number of high ranking officers were on the verge of attempting a coup if the invasion of France had failed. Of course, historically it succeeded, cementing Hitler’s power through to the end of the war. But Hearts of Iron IV has no way to model the failure of Fall Gelb (the invasion of the Low Countries) as a political event which might imperil the Nazi regime. Instead, unless the player is actively and aggressively attempting to intervene in internal German politics in ahistorical ways, Germany remains fully committed to Hitler’s vision down to the end of the war.
Instead, the political system serves as an essentially minimal scaffolding necessary to produce what Hearts of Iron IV actually cares about: the operational simulation. This is perhaps most obvious in the choice of political advisors and military staff, representing essentially key figures in something like a cabinet and a general staff respectively. But while these advisors are named after historical figures (with portraits), they are for the most part just a set of standard bonuses the player is choosing between in preparation for the operational simulator. Any sense that these choices might be dictated by domestic politics is removed by the fact that these slots always (I am unaware of any exceptions) begin empty, so that assembling a collection of advisors – really a collection of advisor-themed bonuses – is a key expenditure of political power in getting ready for the war during the 1930s.
But apart from advisors whose only specific purpose is to promote a specific ideology (which you only choose if you intend to ideology switch to that ideology, there isn’t any need to ‘defend’ the popularity of your current governing ideology because of how static the political model is here), these ‘advisors’ do not interact with your domestic political situation at all.
This is, however, in stark contrast to the thing that does matter quite a lot.
On Focus
Part of the reason the political mechanics remain largely skeletal is that for the most part core player political decision-making doesn’t take place there: it takes place in the focus tree.
Every country in Hearts of Iron IV has a focus tree and nearly all of them are unique. This is a significant change from HoI4‘s structure on release, where only a handful of countries (the major powers) had unique focus trees, while every other country has a ‘default’ focus tree. However, years of updates and DLCs have added bespoke focus trees to nearly every country on the map, with the result that only a handful of small countries use that ‘default’ focus tree. Some countries, however, still have far more developed focus trees than others, which gives a good sense of where the developers expect most players to spend their time (unsurprisingly, major players like the USSR, Germany, Japan all have very expensive trees; the trees for the USA and the UK are more developed than for most minors but also very obviously not at the same level as those for the other major powers – an implication we’ll come back to when we discussing modding).
Each node on the focus tree (a ‘national focus’) represents a specific political decision meant to represent a choice to focus the government on a specific aim for a short period (generally 70 days). These are arranged in a series of ‘trees’ where earlier foci unlock the ability to choose later ones and where branches are frequently mutually exclusive, forcing the player to choose a political direction which may then last over several foci. Most foci are fairly direct, offering some sort of bonus (easier research in a field, some new factories, a small permanent bonus called a ‘national spirit’) once completed, but most countries have a part of their focus tree designed to allow them to switch governing ideology through a series of foci that empower a specific different ideology, and many countries also have foci that unlock casus bellorum enabling them to go to war where they might not otherwise be able to do so.4
So in practice, each country begins the game by selecting a focus of the few available at the top of tree. This triggers a timer (typically 70 days, but many shorter 35-day foci exist, particularly in recently updated trees) after which the focus is completed, the country gets the bonus and a new focus is selected, with a few new choices opened up in the tree by the completion of the first focus and so on.
Enacting a focus is not entirely free. The game attempts to simulate the ‘political capital’ that a government has through a political power currency, which most countries generate at a rate of 2 per day.5 This currency is used to hire new advisors and to change a country’s laws (most notably conscription and economic mobilization laws) and is usually in short supply, particularly in the early game. Enacting a focus costs 1 political power per day (representing the governments efforts to get the job done), so most foci cost 70 political power, which is about half of what most advisors or law changes cost.
That said, national foci are powerful enough that it is fairly rare that any player would want to ignore them for the political power cost (except, rarely, right before a war is about to start, where a player wants to stockpile political power to be able to rapidly shift to stronger mobilization and conscription laws). Instead, the tendency is to have a focus running continuously well into the mid-game, making the key decisions here what focuses to take and in what order.
The range of what national focuses can do is unsurprisingly vast, but there is a common structure, generally. Most countries have a branch of the tree devoted to developing industry, which offers bonus civilian and military factories, extra building slots and research bonuses for that sort of thing, alongside a branch that instead focuses on military development, often unlocking research bonuses for specific kinds of units and national spirits that offer country-specific bonuses to production or combat. For countries that historically had active air or naval arms, this part of the tree is often split into non-mutually exclusive branches between the services, forcing the player to prioritize what part of their military to focus on first.
Then there is generally a series of ‘political paths,’ which often encompass together both domestic and foreign policy. Typically at the top of these trees is the crucial decision to either remain the ideology the country starts as or to attempt to shift ideology, with various ideology shifts having a series of foci which often empower that ideology. Indeed, and this seems worth noting, in a lot of cases, these foci exert a substantially stronger ideological push on a country’s population than most other options the player has, either by unlocking specific ticking modifiers or by unlocking specific decisions (often culminating in a civil war in which the player can, by winning, force the ideology switch). Generally tucked into the political path are also a set of foreign policy choices, usually to include focuses that result in allying with countries of similar ideologies or – for more expansionist ideologies (which is to say not the democratic ones) – foci that offer war goals against various countries to enable military expansion.
The result of all of this is that the key big picture decisions are not made in the political system itself, but rather in the focus system. If the player wants to, say, take Britain non-aligned they do so not by really engaging deeply with the political system, but by selecting the non-aligned focus path, which actually has a focus that starts popular opinion moving non-aligned. This creates something of an oddity because under normal circumstances, the player is clearly positioned as the government, but a player who intends to ideology shift is plotting against their government. In essence, Hearts of Iron IV imagines that the way a county shifts ideologies is that the existing government opts to spend precious political capital undermining itself in order to prepare the war for a civil war it intends to lose.
You may notice that Germany’s focus tree is so vast that it requires a handy navigation aid in the lower left to allow the player to quickly jump to each branch, something not present for the much smaller focus trees for Britain, France, the USSR or the United States (Japan, China and oddly, the British Raj, also have extremely large focus trees with navigator panels). This might suggest something about where the Hearts of Iron team is spending its resources and what they understand about their playerbase.
We’ve seen this problem before, where Paradox titles struggle to decide if the player plays as a government or as the disembodied ‘spirit’ of a state, but of course the idea that nations have spirits at all is a loaded, contested one, bound up with nationalist notions of ‘national destiny.’ Notably, however, the player is very clearly not an expression of the actual public will: at no point is the player actually constrained to follow the popular ideology: it is only the ruling ideology that constrains them. The people and their ideology are, in Hearts of Iron IV for the most part just clay, eager and ready to be molded by the player’s simple decision to click this button and not that one.
And to be clear I think it isn’t too hard to understand why the game has been designed this way: if the core of the Hearts of Iron experience is the operational simulation, then everything else is simply a frame to get the player to that simulation. But of course for the most popular grand strategy game – which is the genre label Paradox prefers for its games – that is a troubling framework because it greatly simplifies the strategic and political layer.
Meme Politics
To explain how, I am going to borrow a term from Samantha Hancox-Li, who called Hearts of Iron IV‘s approach meme politics. Hancox-Li defines the idea of ‘meme politics’ as consisting of three conjoined political assumptions:
- Every policy does exactly what it intends
- Politics is straight forward and information is perfect
- Policy does not face meaningful resistance
And I think that is a relatively fair description of the focus tree system’s approach to politics. Each focus declares, right on the tin, exactly what it will do and these choices never go awry – even the foci that can cause a civil war will have that clearly declared in their descriptions in advance. I find this particularly striking when it comes to industrial policy: just about every country has an industrial policy section of the focus tree, where in most cases they are merely selecting the “I would like more civilian and/or military factories 35 or 70 days from now” focus and letting it run.
But of course in practice in the real world, industrial policy is remarkably difficult and very frequently goes wrong: government interventions often lead to reduplicated efforts, sectors bloated beyond requirements, or they simply fail. Even a casual read of something like Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) reveals how much of a confused muddle Nazi industrial policy was. Allied armaments and economic efforts fared better, but were still often chaotic and impromptu at the time – initial US estimates of the military production possible in 1942, for instance, were wildly over-optimistic – akin to a situation where the ‘build military factory’ focus says it will add ten military factories but only adds five (or none!). But that simply cannot happen in Hearts of Iron IV.
Likewise, there is rarely much meaningful pushback for these focuses: they do what they say they do and only very few carry the possibility of blowback (which is – again, perfect information – clearly marked). An industrial plan never unexpectedly runs up against resistance from industrialists or workers or farmers or foreign financial interests. If you are playing as Communist China, you just trigger the ‘Agricultural Reform’ focus and ‘The Great Production Movement’ which just directly give you bonuses to construction speed and production because no industrial modernization movement led by Mao Zedong ever went wrong due to incomplete information, faulty implementation or any problem of unfounded ideological assumptions.
This lack of blowback is, of course, most obvious in the domestic political branches of the trees. While in many cases switching governing ideology does require a civil war or comes with penalties to stability, in practice making the decision for the government to abolish itself is as simple as clicking on the focus button, at which point the whole machinery of government – represented by the political power you are spending – gets to work on the job of becoming a different kind of government and unless that effort triggers an explicit civil war, no one tries to stop you.
Likewise, so long as you do not trigger one of those ideology-shifting trees, government control is extremely stable. In practice, throughout the war, leaders were abundantly aware that their power might be fragile – that battlefield setbacks or other problems might compromise their ability to lead. Not so in Hearts of Iron IV: governments are only fragile when they choose to be.
It is equally striking that in a game simulating an era of mass politics, the people matter very little to this system. As noted above, radically changing the population’s political beliefs in HoI4 is not hard – it is, in fact, very easy: it costs 150 political power to hire the single advisor who on their own will change a majority of the minds in the country in less than two years. 150 political power is, again, just about twice the cost of a single national focus or the same cost as moving a country’s conscription or mobilization law by a single step. This is a model of politics where once a political faction gets into government, mass-converting the entire populace and country to their ideology is presented as easy, a process of simply hitting the right button.
That said, by May, 1942 I had assembled a mobile force of 10 armored divisions and 10 supporting motorized divisions to attempt to ‘punch outwards’ and launched that offensive in June. The initial goal was to push out eastward from Utrecht and then use the relatively flat ground to run to the Weser before turning north to trap any Germany forces left in the northern Netherlands.
Imperialism by Focus
When I was planning this series, I knew I’d want an example of just how absurd the outcomes that the focus tree can almost effortlessly give you are. Since we’re doing a United Kingdom run in the background, I thought I would use the Imperial Federation decision-chain as an example.
Now the concept of something like an Imperial Federation is not entirely a-historic – like many of these ‘alternate history’ paths, it is based on an idea that was talked about in the period – although as equally frequent the case, an idea that never got very far. From 1887 to 1937, the British Empire held somewhat regular ‘Imperial Conferences,’ where representatives of the constituent elements of the British Empire, including the Dominions, would meet. One of the ideas floated in the late 1880s and very early in the 1900s was the idea of creating a federal superstate encompassing the United Kingdom and the Dominions, an Imperial Federation; the idea never had tremendous support and was basically dead by 1926. But the United Kingdom focus tree lets you revive the concept and – solely as the United Kingdom, by pure force of political will (by which we mean pressing the button) force it through.
The entire sequence requires 12 national focuses, involving investments (fairly modest in scope and which come at no cost except the 70 day delay and political power cost of a focus) in the industry of India and the Dominions and then holding an Imperial Conference.
That then fires an event, the ‘Imperial Conference,’ at which the player can propose various common economic, military and political policies, at which point they can then propose an Imperial Federation. If all of the Dominions (potentially and the British Raj) accept, all of them get massive negative ticking autonomy, causing them to drift inexorably deeper under British control until the final Imperial Federation focus becomes available, annexing Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the British Raj into a single mega-state, the Commonwealth of Nations, which contrary to its name does not in any way function as a federal state, but rather as a single, unitary state of enormous size.6
Now it is possible for the Dominions to refuse – as they absolutely would have if this had been proposed in this period – but by raising their diplomatic opinion to +100, the player can guarantee a 100% acceptance rate. And – more meme politics – raising diplomatic opinion to 100 is simply a matter of clicking the ‘improve relations’ button, which will cost 10 political power to start (so almost nothing) and a ticking cost of 0.2 per day7 will raise relations to +100 in just a couple of months. Want to get the Canadians to like you so much they’d give up self-government for you? Just hit the button.
The result is that in practice it takes a player-run United Kingdom just about two years to achieve something that in practice in the 1930s and 1940s was probably impossible at any level of effort. The popular consciousness of entire countries is effortlessly molded, are a perfectly linear rate of x% per day, into whatever form is required.
Notably, the game also does not ask the player to think at all about the outcome of this decision, it just works. And here I think a brief thought experiment is useful: what would an Imperial Federation c. 1940 entail? Decisions would have to be made about how the Dominions would be represented in a ‘super-parliament’ in London: by population? By white population (think hard about South Africa’s situation before answering)? And what about the Raj? If India was represented by population, it would instantly hold 70% or more of the seats. Now it is hard to see how India and Pakistan – with the Indian independence movement already very well advanced (the Non-cooperation Movement started in 1919!) – would ever agree to any such federation but surely they would not agree to any federation where they had an artificially reduced percentage of the vote. But it is equally impossible to imagine the United Kingdom or the Dominions agreeing to a super-federation that would have been, in practice, the Empire of New Delhi given the balance of votes in a pure by-population-system.
In short, even if India isn’t included, there are just very obvious insurmountable political hurdles here both for actually forming the federation and also that such a federation would immediately face after the war. Including India merely compounds those problems.
Hearts of Iron IV asks the player to consider exactly none of these issues. You simply march linearly down the focus tree, spending political power when necessary, remember to use ‘improve relations’ two to three months before firing the Imperial Conference decision and there you go. The focus to accomplish a probably impossible feat does exactly what it says on the tin, with no pushback and perfect information about the results and the effort requires the whole way through. The problems all, presumably, work themselves out off-screen: a good example of Hearts of Iron IV‘s ‘meme politics’ structure, but hardly a unique one – basically all political questions in HoI4 are resolved this way.
And the wild part is, the Imperial Federation is one of the most complex of such sequences, since it requires a whole event chain and a substantial delay between getting everyone to agree and having the federation actually happen (though mechanically, once everyone agrees, no one can really stop the federation from happening – the downward ticking autonomy is more than anyone is likely to be able to counteract). You hit the right button, wait for the delay and the thing the button says it does happens and the opinions or resistance of the hundreds of millions of people who are involved doesn’t matter a damn.
On the southern end of the pocket, I make it to Dortmund but not deeper into the Rhineland as the terrain there is difficult and the attack runs out of steam before I can secure all of the urban centers. That’s fine – this rush is plenty for now.
The Effect
This is obviously an extremely simplistic model of politics. The contrast with the still-quite-simplified but far more complex political simulation involves in Victoria II or III or Europa Universalis V or Crusader Kings III is remarkable. As Hancox-Li notes, this is a vision of politics which seems to have crept out of gaming spaces into the real world (sometimes more or less explicitly invoked) – an assumption that major changes in society are not difficult or fraught or complex or sometimes backfire, but merely require finding the right button, the right national focus, which is neatly labeled “Do The Thing” on the tin, and pressing it forcefully enough.
And it isn’t hard to see, as a question of development time and focus, how we got here: this is a game about fighting World War II, fundamentally focused on its operational simulation. Everything else – diplomacy, politics, espionage, industrial policy8 – is merely a delivery mechanism, the unadorned, simple frame in which to present the operational painting. And so choices can be simplified down to the basics, made predictable and streamlined so they do not distract the player too much from the core of the game, which is smashing divisions into other divisions. Equally, most of the friction here is removed to facilitate players who want to change up the exact layout of the board where they are smashing their Army Men together.
And to be clear, I have nothing against a pure operational simulation or war games in general. But this is, notionally, supposed to be a grand strategy game. Grand strategy is, definitionally, the coordination of political, diplomatic, economic and military means to achieve strategic ends. If two (three, really, as we’ll see) of those means are radically simplified in this way, are we really doing grand strategy? And if we’re not – why include the strategic simulation at all? Why not structure the game as a series of operations?
But there is, I think a deeper problem here (one we’ll see recur over the next few posts), the unintended implications of these gameplay simplifications. And I’ll be blunt: Hearts of Iron IV presents an authoritarian model of politics. It presents a world in which the authoritarians (both fascists and the communists) are fundamentally right about the nature of politics – that individuals do not matter. All that matters is the state, embodied in the player.
The people in Hearts of Iron IV do not yearn for freedom, nor do they really even have their own ideologies at all. All it takes is hiring the right propagandist and selecting the right focus tree button – decisions whose cost and time investment are trivial compared to the military aspects of the game – and any leader can bend any population into believing anything. In HoI4, the authoritarian, central direction of all of society – culture and economy – is not merely possible, but it is desirable, it is better mechanically, as players will find that authoritarian government forms allow them to adopt better (for military activity, the only thing the game considers) laws earlier, to be more assertive strategically, all while suffering no penalties at all from the effort to centrally direct an entire society. Playing as a democracy in Hearts of Iron IV is essentially a ‘roleplay’ choice to accept limited mechanics for no real benefit.
This stands, of course, in rather direct and remarkable opposition to the actual war in which many of the advantages of democratic forms of government were on display, particularly in the organization and employment of economic resources. The Soviet economic mobilization during the war (conducted in the context of extreme military pressure and lost territory) was undeniably impressive, a feat of will and sacrifice, yet in 1942 and 1943, the United Kingdom – not the British Empire, just the United Kingdom – was outproducing the USSR in total GDP despite having a tiny fraction of the landmass and around a third of the population.9
If anything, the advantages that open, democratic societies could bring to war was even more obvious when it came to research and technological development. The consistency with which the United States and the United Kingdom deployed new technologies first and with greater effectiveness is staggering: radar, sonar (=ASDIC), proximity fuses, industrial technology, superior cryptography, advanced gunsights and stabilizers, new explosives (like Torpex) and of course nuclear weapons. And whereas most powers in the war were forced to specialize on particular classes of military equipment (e.g. Japanese tank designs were outdated, the USSR’s navy was very limited, Germany lacked effective heavy bombers, etc.) the United States and United Kingdom did all of that while also designing competitive equipment models in effectively every category. It is a staggering triumph of intellectual-industrial might that goes almost entirely unsimulated in Hearts of Iron.10
Likewise, the strategic downsides of autocracy – particularly the tendency of autocratic leaders to order foolish, wasteful military actions out of arrogance, ignorance and pride – were abundantly on display in the Second World War for both the Axis and the USSR, but this too is unrepresented in the game.
Fundamentally, Hearts of Iron IV has a political model where all that is required to change the kind of society one has is to seize power and then order the Gleichschaltung11 from above. That is a fundamentally authoritarian view of power and also a fundamentally contested view: part of what the war was about was, on some level, if this view of politics was sustainable, if polities organized on this basis could compete with the liberal democracies and by and large the verdict of the battlefield12 was no, they could not. Hearts of Iron IV grants the question, a priori, to the authoritarians, as an act of uncritical game design: authoritarian politics – fascist politics – work in HoI4 in exactly the way that the fascists of the 1930s and 1940s imagined they did.
In an effort to streamline away any political friction and get straight to the ‘fun stuff’ of war, Hearts of Iron IV adopts a fundamentally authoritarian vision of politics, uncritically and without caveats.
And the resulting vision is simply inaccurate. To take our Imperial Federation example above, in the real world the rising tide of decolonization could not simply be wished away – not even in the 1930s – by hiring the right advisor or pressing the right button. Popular opinion was not, in fact, easily and effortlessly molded by governments, but in fact would spend the 20th century for the most part bending governments rather than being bent by them. World War II was a war of mass politics in which the politics of the masses mattered a great deal and the decision by HoI4 to simplify that away into an exercise of pure state power leaves the player with quite a misleading assumption of how the politics of the 1930s came to be the way they were.
One understands the desire to simplify the mechanics that frame the core experience of a game, but it is necessary to be very careful in how those elements are simplified so that the simplification doesn’t end up doing violence to the underlying history.
Unfortunately, domestic politics is hardly the only historical concern of the 1930s and 1940s that Hearts of Iron IV airbrushes away – next week we’ll turn to the questions of occupation, bombing and war crimes. It isn’t going to get better.
- in the correct meaning of the phrase as granting the conclusion of a debate from the beginning.
- In particular, relations have relatively little impact on gameplay, except for trade (where positive relations are generally sufficient) and certain events (where the requirement is often relations at very high levels, where small bonuses do not mean much against the potential +100 ‘improve relations’ action. Diplomatic relations are simply not an important mechanic in most runs.
- Indeed, while Britain outproduced Germany in planes and wildly so in ships, it came quite close to matching German armored vehicle production tank for tank, while producing substantially more artillery and support vehicles than Germany did. For an overview of war production, see the relevant chapters in R. Overy, Why the Allies Won (1997) which covers the figures quite well. We’ll come back to this topic later in this series.
- The plural of casus belli is casus bellorum; casus (note: not causa, not ’cause’ for war, but ‘occasion’ (casus) for war) is Fourth Declension and so its plural is also casus, while belli needs a genitive plural, bellorum, ‘occasions (plural) for wars (plural).’
- Modified by difficulty. One of the major ways the harder difficulties are made harder is by reducing political power gain by a percentage, thus ‘starving’ a player for political power in the early game.
- The real challenge with taking this route is balancing the political power demands of preparing for war with the costs of this route and keeping the autonomy of South Africa and India carefully under control as you do so. That said, as you can see in the screenshots, once the player sets out to do this, achieving it is a basically mechanical process. Notably it is also entirely independent of how the war itself is going so long as Germany isn’t invading the United Kingdom itself: the Dominions will happily jump on a sinking ship as surely as a United Kingdom that has made itself the undisputed imperial master of Europe.
- 0.4 for India because it is non-aligned.
- Really also naval warfare.
- And you may ask, “But the USSR made so many tanks and so much artillery! Indeed it did, but of course the United Kingdom was also churning out aircraft (more of these on its own than the USSR, I may note) and ships in enormous quantity, as well as fielding a fully motorized army that demanded a lot more support vehicles than the USSR. The point here is not that the Soviet mobilization was botched – I don’t think one can argue it was, given the difficult conditions the USSR faced post-1941 – but that the British mobilization approach clearly worked. It certainly worked better than that of Germany or Italy or Japan and arguably better than that of the Soviet Union. And all that is without touching the economic mobilization juggernaut that was the United States.
- Indeed, the reverse is true: split between needing to keep up in air, land and naval technology, the United Kingdom generally has to fall behind somewhere. In the run above, the ‘somewhere’ was naval technology, where I researched basically no new hull designs, merely iterating on existing patterns because the pre-war UK fleet was mostly ‘good enough.’
- Literally ‘coordination,’ the Nazi term for compelling all institutions to submit to Nazi party totalitarian control, with the idea that the entire society – economy, culture, media, all of it – would be effectively Nazi-fied.
- I am simplifying, of course, because the question extends out into the Cold War, albeit delivering the same eventual verdict.
I feel like the ideology systems main problems all come from the fact that it was very clearly adapted into a representation of the political popularity of individual parties, when it was originally just supposed to be diplomatic alignment, like in hoi3. The intent at the start was obviously that democratic countries are countries aligned with the western allies, the communist countries are aligned with the soviets, fascist countries are aligned with the axis. And non aligned countries are, well, non-aligned. But as the game went on this system was retrofitted into representing the domestic political feeling more and more.
Yep, this is absolutely a thing (and probably something they might change for HOI5 if that ever happens) You can kinda tell how what started out as a somewhat reasonable abstraction (in the sesne that the game had a very barebones model in the first place)
The problem with Strategy Games is that at heart they’re a fundamentally top-down genre that simply doesn’t run very well if individual units fail to do exactly what they’re told or die trying.
This is a very, very bad way to model any kind of Human history and it worries me that some players may not actually realise why this should be the case.
The notion that this way of thinking is playing a role in actual politics is outright horrifying.
Well, yeah. They’re games. Games are inherently simplistic, and there’s nothing wrong with that. HOI4 is Axis & Allies on steroids, and that’s okay. Nobody’s playing Paradox grand strategy games and applying it to real-world politics.
If it looks like it is because of incompetent decisions in the present-day political arena, the problems are far deeper than that.
This is like criticizing Simcity or Cities Skylines for not accurately modeling how a city works. So what? Is it fun to play? Yes? Then it’s a good game.
Obviously no game is actually realistic but the whole reason for Teaching Paradox as a series is that Paradox games are percieved (and to an extent advertised) as being realistic-ish and with most people not taking history courses for fun they can easily have the games become their reference point for history even knowing there are gameplay abstractions. So they’re as open to media criticism as anything entirely separate from gameplay.
I don’t see any historical game players as using the game as a substitute for history. In fact, I would argue the inverse: players have active and deep interest in the represented era and want to game out what-ifs. And the political dimension is extremely difficult to model accurately without making it impossible to play.
Here’s an exercise. How do you model the Battle of France accurately? On paper, the opposing forces point to a slight edge for the Allies. So then how do you model a three-day gamble at Sedan that cascaded up to Reynaud and sealed France’s fate? Does France get a “Helene de Portes” nerf which translates to a -10% fire rate for infantry? Does the Wehrmacht get a +20% speed boost from having radios in all their tanks? Does Belgium get a “Leopold III is a dumbass” event trigger that surrenders the army once the Nazis reach the Channel? You can only do so much. I’ll tell you this: the Galactic Community in Stellaris is by far the most useless and irritating aspect of that game.
The issue with that is that the allies did have superiority on paper in the battle of France. It was kind of a coin flip that got German victory.
But the game needs AI Germany vs. AI France to end in German victory 100% of the time, so they nerf France and buff Germany.
So I mostly stick to CK with occasional forays into Victoria and visits to Imperator, but based on my experiences on the forums, for a lot of players the games are actually their deepest look at history, and they can notice some obvious game contrivances but subconsciously they get the idea the game is in fact fairly accurate, or feel it should be and ask for changes to remove “inaccuracies” such as it being difficult for a king to arrest a duke without pushback even with no legal justification. So in the specific case of Paradox historical Grand Strategy games I feel it is appropriate to criticize the implications of inaccurate portrayals, even though Paradox clearly is just making fun gameplay rather than intentionally pushing a pro-Nazi agenda.
And the Battle of France comes in for criticism in these conversations in particular because in order to have a game in which Germany is likely to win but a France player can, you know, give orders, it stacks the deck for Germany, plus it has a combat model that doesn’t represent the actual impact of not having radios in all French tanks so the France player doesn’t have to sit there staring at a screen while the orders they already issued several minutes ago and are now outdated slowly trickle out to their units.
Most global (as opposed to say War in the East that’s just the Germany-Russia front and it’s assumed everything else ticks along historically more-or-less) WW2 games that aren’t a fixed campaign made of one-off battles handle this by simply not having the Battle of France at all; the game starts on December 7th 1941 as the leader of the Pearl Harbor raid gives the order to attack, or right after the planes are back on their carriers. France has fallen, the Red Army is in the process of beginning to fend off the Nazi invasion, the British fleet is prohibiting Operation Sealion, and Japan has made the catastrophic error of bringing in the US. Then there’s a victory point system where the Axis win by outperforming history with zero expectation they can get an outright victory against a remotely equally skilled opponent or even the AI, so the game doesn’t have to fudge relative industrial capacity too much.
But Hearts Of Iron puts its start date much earlier and since players know this is a WW2 game the French and British players do not make such a string of terrible decisions and for gameplay reasons are not compelled to do things they know will end badly because that’s no fun. So it’s a genuine problem that what’s touted as the most realistic WW2 game most people will play misrepresents the actual facts so badly.
I guess I don’t see this as a problem. I’d argue all other Paradox GS games have even more historical inaccuracy for all of their aspects since so much of the historical record is either lost entirely or incomplete. It’s not stopping you in CK from marrying a horse. (Or is it spawning a horse? I forget how the whole Glitterhoof thing came around.)
Returning to my own example: I don’t blame Simcity for giving me the wrong idea of how cities are run.
(I do blame Simcity for not being more global in its outlook. There is a line in the manual for Simcity 2000 which I still remember, 26 years later: “Sims love to drive.” In other words, the pathfinding heuristic and transport mode weighting for all Simcity games advantages cars. How depressingly American. Then SC2013 went further and removed subways entirely in favor of streetcars or some nonsense. What a bunch of assholes. It’s no wonder Cities Skylines was successful, although you do have to play with mods.)
So Glitterhoof is simply a direct reference to Caligula allegedly making his horse a Senator* and happens randomly if you have the Lunatic trait representing being severely mentally ill and you replace a councilor with him and he has a zero in the relevant stat and you’re not supposed to be able to do anything with him except fill a councilor slot and have funny additional totally insane events to do stuff like blow a thousand gold on high-end armor to protect him from assassins, and the player is meant to take from this that sometimes Medieval rulers were very obviously insane but couldn’t be replaced, which is in fact true on occasion. You can do shenanigans to make him Pope and have a Horse Vatican but this is an obvious glitch which hasn’t been fixed both because it isn’t really a problem and like Skyrim giants punting you into space is very funny.
In general aside from some events that in CK2 could be disabled that are just straight-up obvious magic CK aims to set up the systems to allow things that could happen in theory, although with CK3 I feel they made a very critical error with the MaA system as essentially a professional national army and also the numbers determining how difficult doing wildly ahistorical stuff like the Patriarch of Constantinople declaring incest is legal (happened within twenty years of my first BGA attempt in Europe I unpaused for and I had nothing to do with it) is are way too low.
But like with Sim City and car dependence what’s possible in a game billed as a simulation has way more impact on people’s subconscious beliefs than they realize. I played Sim City 2000 as a kid and I always knew it wasn’t the real world but it is in fact how I learned it’s important to have the right mix of commercial, industrial, and residential development so businesses can have enough workers and most residents have jobs, zoning existed, and cities pass laws to keep polluting factories away from residential areas to protect both health and property values.
And as I’ve grown up I’ve learned some of the complications reality introduces but as I have never considered a career in policymaking I have never deeply studied it and the Sims 3000 strategy guide is where I first saw the term NIMBY. And of course I can’t prove this but I think if public transit had been clearly optimal in Sim City when many current voters were growing up real world train and bus systems would have a stronger constituency because I’m hardly the only person who first encountered zoning in Sim City and has never actually read zoning laws even for their own town.
In general the media we consume shapes our worldview subconciously in ways like while we know Iron Man is fictional, news outlets called Elon Musk a real-life Tony Stark and that didn’t mean anyone thought he could become Iron Man but for a very long time people treated him as an eccentric genius whose foibles could be tolerated because his vision would solve Climate Change and take us to the stars, and I don’t think that broke for most people until the Twitter takeover. And the idea someone like Tony Stark will lead us to the future is still fueling the AI hype, I think. Plus people’s ideas about AI are usually very clearly directly from science fiction. This doesn’t mean Marvel should never have made the MCU but it does mean articles equivalent to this one about how inventing technology in real life isn’t done by a single abrasive genius mostly solo about the MCU are worth writing.
*From what I’ve heard in reality most likely Caligula said it and possibly did a ceremony purely to mock the Senate for being so useless his horse could do the job just fine; what I’ve seen from modern historians is that possibly the story his personality changed drastically after brain damage from a serious fever
So, just a quick aside regarding “Do people inform their decisions about key topics via fiction?”; yes, they absolutely do and no, it’s not really a question if you pay attention. That also occurs on just about any level: see how it’s been widely reported that Biden signed an executive order on AI…soon after watching Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One (wow, what a clunky title!) at Camp David.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/joe-biden-ai-mission-impossible-b2440365.html
A really famous example is Reagan reportedly getting influenced to do disarmament and lower tensions after watching The Day After, a film about a dust-up in Europe that went nuclear from the perspective of civilians in the US going about their lives listening worriedly to the news until the announcement that they need to get to the fallout shelters, as well as a guy at a nuke silo who after it launches decides he will not in fact stick around to hopefully decoy in a bomb on an empty silo. Notably this movie did not get DoD cooperation like a lot of movies did because the writers refused to specify who launched the first nuke since the message was that a nuclear war could happen more-or-less accidentally.
The headline is hyperbolic, but the actual article makes clear that the movie was one event, and not a deciding factor, in several months of deliberations and input for a President who was already skeptical of the technology. Try again. And no, Trump doesn’t count—his issues are much more fundamental.
How about the late US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia?
https://apnews.com/supreme-court-of-the-united-states-united-states-government-6bfd8d97e865451c95fc266e1c29be82
Sure seems like if 24 had routinely depicted anonymous calls stopping terror attacks instead of torture, Scalia’s position would have shifted accordingly!
P.S. Oh, and it would be nice if you reply to guy’s The Day After example as well. (For that matter, I recall hearing that a White House screening of High Noon had taken place not long before the 2003 invasion of Iraq was set in motion – though if so, that is admittedly much more diffuse influence when compared to OOP and these other examples.)
I’m sorry, I think I missed the part where Scalia making idle chitchat about hypotheticals actually influenced US policy. John Yoo’s and Jay Bybee’s torture memos were not authored as a result of reactionary dramas on Fox. Secondly, SCOTUS routinely uses hypotheticals during oral arguments to suss out what the different sides of issues are, or engage the practical effects of rulings. The fact that some justices like Brett Kavanaugh (who dishonors himself, SCOTUS, the country, and the name Bret) engage with hypotheticals rooted in fiction (e.g. voter fraud is a problem) is a function of their inherent political bias and their goal to implement permanent Republican rule impervious to Democratic lawmaking, not because they read a piece of fiction. Like a drunk leaning on a lamppost, they rely on these fictions for support, not illumination.
It is not credible to trace the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, more than 7 years in the making, to a screening of a TV movie. Reagan was a former Hollywood guy and was being appreciative of the craft. It is more likely he was stroking his old pals in show business to shore up political support. It is not credible to pretend that without The Day After the treaty never would have happened.
And a read of Against All Enemies by Richard Clarke and Cobra II by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor reveals that the Bush Administration had made up its mind to go to war with Iraq fairly soon after 9/11, and once that goal was in place, the administration stopped at nothing, including and especially public opinion, to fabricate and deceive and build the inertia to war.
I’m tired of this whack-a-mole so consider this the end of our exchange please.
There is this underlying problem that treating war as a “game” that can be “won” is fundamentally an authoritarian mindset. And further, that the basic conceit of any game is that one, and only one, individual involved in the game has any agency at all: the player. Trying to apply any of this to the real world is a horrifying failure mode – but it’s a popular approach due to its simplicity and emotional reward.
This gets worse when a game-play approach to war seems initially to succeed (the shortcomings are mostly long term). This can lead to disaster when attempting to apply what worked on a small scale with an overwhelming force advantage to a larger, more complicated setting. Venezuela and Iran.
I do note that there are ways of doing this; Paradox itself has kinda experimented in that direction with Victoria and Crusader Kings in various different way, where various portions of the political apparatus is delegated to AI who “plays itself” not neccessarily under your control.
It’s obviously still a simplification (duh, a simulation of history would literally *be* history and is thus untenable for all sorts of reasons)
You can have strategy games that don’t work like that, but designing ones that can be umpired by a computer is extremely difficult, especially when we rule out the use of LLMs (either because they’re deemed bad or simply didn’t exist for most of the genre’s history).
in HOI4 units failing to do exactly what they’re told just retreat when their organization hit zero, not die trying.
Send your units into battles without supplies and they will give up very soon.
The obvious solution here of course is for someone to create a mod that introduces all these factors into the calculations, then brand said mod as hardcore (or dare I say, Pedantic) mode that gets popular enough that in order to be a top player, you’re basically forced to think through the real world implications.
To be entirely fair to paradox, the main reason why the UK and the USA (and even to a lesser extent France with La Resistance) have such small focus trees compared to other countries, is that they were given updated focus trees on the old man the guns DLC and then priority shifted to the next countries “In line” To get eitheir content at all for most minor nations or updated content if they were a major country. Japan has a huge focus tree now but before 2025 it was tiny and frankly pretty terrible. And now the USA is the “Next in line” for new content.
That’s also combined with the fact that Focus tree design has massively changed in the years since release. No step back was the first real “Modern” focus tree and every new focus tree has been building on that (for better and for worse), promising bigger and more overpowered stuff to get sales going.
It’s noteworthy that perhaps one of the only times the game ever tried to model the drawbacks of having an authoritarian mode of government, the “Stalin’s Paranoia” system they introduced for the USSR in (I think) the No Step Back DLC, it was quite poorly received and unpopular with the player base. And, like, I get it, its incredibly frustrating to be trying to get your military ducks in a row only to find out Stalin has purged yet more officers, and ultimately my understanding is that it doesn’t really end up being an accurate simulation of the Great Purges either, but at least they tried.
The political system they built is just fundamentally unable to model, well, politics without making the game miserable to play, and I think that cake was baked in some of the earliest design choices they made in development and probably cannot be fixed until HoI5— although given the massive popularity of HoI4, why would they bother to try?
They did sort of try with Italy and Japan as well. Mussolini can give you missions if you’re playing Fascist Italy to do things like build more planes or expand the army, but you only get bonuses from completing them, there’s not penalty for ignoring them. Japan has a similar system but you get missions from the Civilian Government, the Zaibatsus, The IJA, and the IJN and these do actually effect your internal politics with factions gaining influence if you complete the mission and loosing influence if you fail it, and certain focuses require factions to have a specific level of influence. For instance if the IJN has made the IJA politically irrelevant you can’t take the focuses to go to war with the USSR as Japan. It’s still not great, but there was an attempt.
You can lose some political power if you fail. It’s effectively meaningless though.
The only real catastrophic downsides that hoi4 models are Italy devolving into civil war if it’s invaded and France devolving into civil war if it invades Germany over the Rhineland (well, technically it’s just France getting involved in a major war before it can go down it’s focus tree, why is immaterial).
Paradox has lately had a real problem with implementing stuff that makes the game harder in a way that’s remotely fun to play. I would guess a large part of the backlash to the No Step Back thing is a result of not having any real tools to tell Stalin “no, no, this guy is a true hero of the Revolution and should be promoted, not purged.” Also no one likes spending money on DLC that just punches them in the face so if this didn’t come with big bonuses to keeping troops in the fight (I would think best modeled by negating like 40% of organizational damage) I can see everyone being quite upset having paid to make the play experience worse.
CoH2 had a mission that tried to simulate Not One Step Back essentially by automatically executing units who retreated. To my understanding that’s an exaggeration of actual practice, where in some contexts officers could order retreats even in the most strict period, but it worked in play because you had the choice to simply not order retreats and either accept a unit pinned down in the open by machine guns was dead or rush in support to rescue them. And the suppression/morale system of CoH and its sister Dawn of War series was born from the realization that RTS players hate losing control of their units, so instead a morale break gives a catastrophic penalty to damage output but retreating is a button you push. It’s still basically impossible to accomplish anything with a unit at zero morale/max suppression unless it has a special ability like a (in DoW, maybe CoH2 as well) execution by the unit’s commissar that restores morale but being able to decide whether or not it runs away is much more fun than maybe it decides to flee directly into a deathtrap.
So for HoI probably the way to go involves being able to spend some sort of currency (not sure which) to shield key officers from Stalin and having the survivors be less likely to do their own thing, probably in the form of sticking in losing fights more insistently. And maybe as a free update.
Paradox was able to make crazy rulers screwing things up fun in Crusader Kings. An insane ruler, or a ruler who becomes paranoid, or a lecherous ruler, or pick your personality defect is an accepted, even fun part of the game. The focus of Crusader Kings is different, but playing Germany and having to overcome negative events and modifiers related to Hitler could be a thing. Having to spend political power to replace Goering with someone competent could be a thing. Maybe anything that made a player say “this would be so easy if Hitler/Mussolini/Stalin would stop screwing things up.”
I do note that a lot of countries actually do kinda have a “Start with a ton of red numbers, then do various things to fix it”. Italy in particular is kinda interesting because while they can get some good bonuses they can generally not get rid of *all* the red numbers
Crusader Kings also lasts centuries, not a single decade. I think the timeframe and ability to recover plays a big role in players’ response.
Caesar III (1998) – a city-builder with a fairly simple military simulation, but one you can’t afford to neglect – has a morale mechanic. Legionaries who are hopelessly outmatched in a fight will run back to camp, stand there visibly trembling and refuse any further orders. IIRC the last remnants of a clearly defeated enemy army will also run away rather than fight to the last man (much more realistic than in many RTS games!)
It doesn’t make that much of a difference in gameplay terms – if the barbarians arrive and you haven’t built up sufficient military force to repel them, you’re cooked; whether that looks like “your legions get slaughtered to the last man by the barbarians who proceed to destroy your city” or “your legions get outmatched, run back to camp and watch helplessly as the barbarians destroy your city” is essentially cosmetic. But it does add a nice touch of realism.
Played it a bit; I would say the way the command mechanics work make that effectively cosmetic and when you put a Legion marker down it stays where it is until running out of de facto HP and IIRC being removed entirely and respawning at the base. And I’ve also played Zeus, a successor to Caesar 3, and the gods and heroes go around autonomously and sometimes Hercules or whoever just doesn’t feel like going straight into a fight and it’s infuriating, although generally not serious because the mechanics are such that building an appropriate city and providing a sufficient bribe to get Hercules to show up to fight the Hydra or whatever is just a victory condition and the actual process of killing the Hydra is more or less a slightly delayed victory cutscene that happens to be in-engine. With the gods normally they walk around the city like Caesar 3’s wanderers from time to time randomly blessing things and it’s annoying when they go somewhere useless with nothing that god can bless but most of the point of having their sanctuary is unconnected to whether they actually are on the map, and god fights are also de facto cutscenes where Zeus trumps Hera trumps Hermes with zero chance for upsets.
In Dawn of War the simulation is sufficiently detailed that troops could retreat right into a minefield or suchlike, hence fairly early on in development it was decided to not make that happen without player input.
HOI4 is fundamentally an army-smashing game. Put together an army, and smash it against the other player’s army while making pew-pew noises. The entire game design is built around the army-smashing fantasy, which is why anything that might interfere with the fantasy is either ignored or smoothed into irrelevance. Recall that HOI4 did not ship with a meaningful logistics system, that pesky thing that tends to dictate operations in modern warfare.
It’s why HOI4 ignores diplomacy, politics, and the entire human population of the countries at war and presumably who live in the cities and towns and villages being fought over.
This is probably also a deliberate marketing strategy: you can’t pander to the customers who want a clean Wehrmacht or Red Army fantasy that would break if they had to consider what exactly is happening on the ground.
Also focus trees are an original sin of HOI4. Not only do they lock countries into nonsensical paths, and are basically impossible to troubleshoot, but they also seize control of other countries: if you are playing as the Raj and your overlord clicks a button, there’s precious little you can do to stop the consequences. It’s plain bad game design, unless you treat HOI4 as basically an army-smashing toy feeding a particular fantasy.
Heads up, screenshots are functionally unreadable. I’m sure that second screenshot says lots of interesting things about the internal alignment of those countries, but I have absolutely no idea what that is. I understand having fairly low res versions in-text to keep formatting nice and flow going (especially when reading in mobile), but those are too small to read any of the text on them. Opening them up in a new page just scales them up to a horrendous blurry mess. The way most of the internet works is to have the small thumbnail open up into a full resolution image when you click on them, which would surely be the best solution here too.
If you edit the URL after opening the image in a new tab to remove the ‘?’ and everything after it, you can see the image full size. For example, the full Britain focus tree is at https://i0.wp.com/acoup.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/image.png
Thanks, that works great! Good to know that the full images are actually on the server. It seems like our host simply forgets to make the thumbnails a link to the full image itself.
This is also not a new problem, but rather an ongoing problem. It’s basically every image, even the unlinked ones snerked from Wikipedia.
I think saying Gleichschaltung translates to “literally ‘coordination'” is underselling it a lot. Also, Koordination is a word in German with basically no difference in meaning to coordination and the pedantry shall not be mitigated.
“Gleich” as a German root translates pretty directly to “same”, while “Schaltung” is a bit of a nebulous word but always related to mechanics, design and intentional switching. For example, Gangschaltung is the word for switchable gearings on bikes or cars, while Reihenschaltung and Parallelschaltung are the words for series and parallel circuits, respectively. Therefore, taken together it implies that things aren’t just coordinated, but actually the same, working in perfect lockstep, and that this is a mechanical, designable process – basically “meme politics” as a mission statement. And it’s important to note that the word is a Nazi construct to describe their political process – even in German it doesn’t have any other uses than to describe what the Nazis were doing (for obvious reasons, nobody wanted to continue to use that word after ’45).
Somewhat frustratingly, Gleichschaltung was actually a pretty straightforward and frictionless process, as basically all German institutions just surrendered in advance and allowed themselves to be re-organized to be easily controllable by party lackeys.
That is not actually true, after the Nazis came to power in 1933 they spent the first months smashing any institutions that could oppose them, like trade unions, the Communist party, the press, local courts etc. It was in fact quite violent in that any opponents were dragged out of meetings, beaten, murdered or thrown into the first concentration camps which were set up around this time for political opponents of the regime.
“I think saying Gleichschaltung translates to “literally ‘coordination’” is underselling it a lot.”
Quite. The meaning is somewhere along the lines of “equalization” or “uniformization”. As in, “everything should become the same”. Implying much more force and, well, uniformity, than mere “coordination”.
A bit similar to the Soviet “uravnilovka”, but arguably even more broader, as the latter was limited to economy (or rather the wages) only.
It is interesting to contemplate how the evolution of the Hearts of Iron games has made them even more authoritarian in their structure and worldview by virtue of becoming less reliant on events that (at least hypothetically) could be programmed to fire from conditions in the background and which could have deliberately misleading tooltips in the choices they present to the player, etc. These were still games in which becoming fascist or communist was simply a matter of moving sliders locked by timers, of course, but there was potential there for trying to develop in the direction of “managing chaos”, of wrestling with balancing the swirling currents which a given state faced during the time period… and instead it moved in the opposite direction, towards, ironically, a more proscribed set of options.
It’s also worth noting that this is in part also a result of streamlining those politics from earlier iterations in the series. The ideological system in particular is a significant simplification from HoI 2 and 3, and HoI2 in particular had a fairly more involved diplomatic system more closely resembling the EU series than the current iteration of HoI.
Some mods like Kaiserreich retain that older and more complex ideological system, but paired up with the new mission/focus tree system it just becomes the same branch of meme political authoritarianism with a different paint.
they did add the Decision mechanics which is less predictable than focus trees, but they still keep the focus tree as it is one of HOI4 core features from the start. HOI4 is currently the most rail-roaded PDX game, you can event see the “railroad” itself and where it leads to.
So, in other words, if real world politics worked the way HOI4 politics work Quebec would have left Canada back when the Bloc Québécois got enough votes to form the Disloyal Opposition.
It sounds more like the Bloc would have taken over Canada in this simulation.
They’re a separation party. Their goal is to leave, not take over.
(And also the Loyal Opposition isn’t the government. They weren’t in charge of Canada, they were in charge of keeping the government honest.)
We’ve activated the Referendum on Separation Focus, mes amis! 70 days and public opinion will be ours!
I think they are actually working on a Canada focus tree for the next DLC, it’s quite possible we will see a focus tree path for French Canadian independence when it comes out lol.
Ah yes, because a war is exactly when you want to be negotiating splitting off part of your country.
To the separatists, of course, it’s not your country.
How persuasive someone might find ‘you can’t spare the troops to stop us, if you do stop us you may or may not find out the meaning of the phrase “fifth column,” and who knows what we might be willing to give in a negotiated settlement to save all that unpleasantness’ would depend on circumstances, I’m sure.
We’ve seen this before. The FLQ didn’t do well when the government decided something had to be done.
Americans seem to think this sort of thing works. It works (occasionally) when the area is a long way away from where troops are, and when the area is, frankly, secondary to where the government has its attention.
For WW2 (the period HOI4 is supposed to be simulating), mostly it means that Canada ends up not sending nearly as many soldiers to Europe, because they’re fighting a hot civil war at home.
I was referring to how HOI4 has to model it, since the player is nominally playing as the main government and not the separatist party.
@Random Driveby,
I mean, yea, a major war is *exactly* the time when I would want to start up a separatist insurgency. That’s when you would have the best chance for success.
I don’t think it’s an accident that, for example, WWI helped to fire up nationalism among the subject nations of both the Habsburg and Romanov empires, since they thought that they might actually have a chance at winning if their overlords were sufficiently weakened.
This is really a tangential ramble, but as I mentioned in previous entries, I never really got into HOI, in large part, because I already played a massive WW2 based strategy game, World in Flames.
Now WiF is a board game, not a computer game, so things are a lot more abstract, since you don’t have the computer handling all the fiddly bits for you. And that in and of itself forces design choices. But one thing I love about WiF and doesn’t seem to happen based on your description of HoI, is that WiF is all about managing fundamentally uncertain processes. Almost everything is randomized in WiF, especially political effects (Although political effects are much simplified, and basically the only major ‘political’ game mechanic is how the U.S. entry stuff works), but that in turn is done by a number of actions possibly pushing the U.S. for or against the Allies (or really from a more pro-allied vs neutrality option); but those are handled like follows: Germany declaring war on Poland rates a 12. That means you automatically get 1 entry chit in the Germany pool, and you roll a (10 sided) die. On a one or a two, you get a second one, otherwise, only one. Different actions have different values.
When you do draw or remove chits, you actually have physical pieces with a hidden entry value. Not all chits are equal. So something like the Japanese sacking another major Chinese city (entry value of 4, so i.e. 40% of an anti-Japan chit and 60% chance of nothing happening) has randomness on 2 ends, whether this latest incident makes it through to the American public, and how much effect it has if it does.
Even the length of the game turns is randomized; while each turn represents two months, you have a varying number of ‘impulses’ (which is where you get to move and fight) per turn. The same inputs, all across the game, can yield wildly different outputs, and especially in small actions, you get a lot of unpredictability. That seems to be the diametric opposite of how HoI is designed. I wonder how much of that is board game vs computer game forcing certain design decisions and how much is actually different visions of the games.
I’d think a lot of it is different visions – for instance, HOI4 wants to give you the option for the US to join the fascists, rather than just be slow or fast at joining the war. Our host’s comment that it’s trying to facilitate changing up the board that you’re smashing your armies together on seems like a fair cop.
(I haven’t played WIF, but from Googling, it looks like it starts in 1939 with Germany already at war, which certainly narrows the scope of political maneuvering you can do before things kick off.)
There was a popular (complicated) mod for HoI2 called WiF. I would bet it is heavily based on the board game. I think you would like it.
As someone who’s played virtually all the major cardboard grand strategic ww2 games, yeah, the political outlines are always fixed in them, because it would be insane to try to let people draw outside them in the context of analog rules.
Axis Empires kinda lets you do it with the module that starts an alternate history from ww1 but even in that context, though the USA can be communist or fascist, it will always be fighting Germany by the Total War Phase, whatever form Germany is. It’s a limitation of fixed components.
At some level, I think games emphasizing smashing the soldiers together are going to tend toward an authoritarian model- militaries are inherently authoritarian structures. I’m not really sure a Victoria-level simulation of politics would be particularly welcome if you’re trying to choose between which kind of emphasis to put on heavy tanks.
Could you do an addendum to this series about the “Clean Wehrmacht” myth, why it was so popular and why it’s a myth? Or perhaps add that and other similar myths (like the ‘Lost Cause’ myth) as an idea to your ever-growing pile of future posts?
Oh, and I don’t think Hitler needs to worry about your breakthrough. As soon as Steiner attacks, everything will be in order.
I think the clean Wehrmacht would be in the next post in this series.
While I respect OGH, I don’t think he’s quite got the chops to handle that sort of thing without buying into the myths that have arisen in response to the previous ones (particularly when it comes to the “Lost Cause.”)
Bunch of nitpicky game mechanic comments. None of these meaningfully challenge the thesis, they’re just notes about how the game can function if you find edge cases.
“These ideologies do matter, because the governing ideology of a country determines what actions it can take, although in practice this is just an exciting set of disabilities applied to democracies. Democracies are heavily limited in the actions they can take, particularly not being able to declare war without meeting specific conditions, with requirements that ‘world tension’ (the amount of conflict in the game) reach certain levels before they can take actions.”
Except certain special political systems, like a “constitutional” monarchist Rome which has no elections and effectively no idealogical restrictions, but is technically a democracy.
“Meanwhile, there is the absolute mess of the ‘non-aligned’ ideology, which encompasses non-fascist despotism, traditional absolute monarchy, quasi-democratic oligarchies, colonial dependencies and even the fractured, military-dominated political structure of the Japanese Empire.”
It also represents both the East Indian Company if you want to refound it as the Raj, and the Anarcho-communist uprising in the Spanish civil war (which splits the difference between non aligned and communist in the pie chart before becoming fully non aligned).
But most non aligned idealogies are monarchies.
“there is no way to start a global ‘non-aligned’ movement the way that democracies, fascists and communists can all create (or start with) factions aimed at promoting their ideology.”
It’s possible on ahistorical mode. It’s not uncommon to see central Europe become a non aligned power block, either Germany or Austria centered, and with player control you can expand it to cover an eclectic mix of middle eastern, Asian, and south American monarchical nations. It effectively acts as an anti communist block, and the biggest effect is that America and Britain are much more likely to sit out WW2 if monarchies and communists are fighting.
“But apart from advisors whose only specific purpose is to promote a specific ideology (which you only choose if you intend to ideology switch to that ideology, there isn’t any need to ‘defend’ the popularity of your current governing ideology because of how static the political model is here), these ‘advisors’ do not interact with your domestic political situation at all.”
Mostly. Some nations have balance of power mechanics, to writ Italy has a national council of fascism and the ruler and Japan has the rivalries between the civilian government, navy, army, and industrial conglomerates. In a few cases you can influence balance of power by appointing advisors, but it amounts to little; iirc you can never fatally destabilize your government, which rules with total authority.
“That said, national foci are powerful enough that it is fairly rare that any player would want to ignore them for the political power cost…”
There are a few other exceptions, like anarchist Spain, which uses political power to core states, any states: it’s exceedingly powerful if you fully integrate France and China or india, as you get their millions of manpower wedded to European industry.
But overall, yeah.
“iirc you can never fatally destabilize your government,”
You can actually do that even with “regular” gameplay mechanics, IIRC; though it’s so rare it basically never happen. A combination of, IIRC; low stability and high popularity for the “wrong” ideology can lead to a “generic” civil war event. It’s just something that almost never happens because if you’re in that situation you’re almost certainly at war (and being pasted) and you’ll capitulate before it fires.
True, although it’s much more likely to happen as a result of foreign influence and subversion. Coups and civil wars are usually occur if another nation is supporting the drift, or using agents to actively arm the rebels. Otherwise the switch can be more gradual, with negative events that slowly progress to civil war.
Although this is very rarely directed at the player by the AI, to be clear.
It’s hinted at through out this post, but there are reasons to think that the pro-authoritarian model of HoI4 isn’t entirely an accidental by-product of the game design focussing on operational aspects.
I’m not a HoI player, but I’m fairly active in multiple online spaces about Paradox games (where, our host might be pleased to know, his blog is widely circulated). It’s an open secret that a lot of HoI4 fanbase is on the extreme-far-right. I do *not* mean that everyone who likes Hoi4 is a Nazi; or that everyone who’s active in the HoI4 community is a Nazi. Or even that the majority are. But it is a minority that is large enough to be noticed. I doubt that Paradox set out with the deliberate attention to capture this demographic but, now that they have, they’re unlikely to make decisions that will upset them. DLC sales are the majority of pdx income, which means keeping existing fans happy and engaged is usually more important than acquiring new ones.
But then again, the demographics for HoI4 could just be weird; after all, the “My Little Pony” mod for HoI4 is one of the most popular ones for that game, with a staggering 300,000 unique subscribers.
The My Little Pony Mod is just astonishingly well made and fun to play, and since it’s not set in actual history it’s free to use focus trees to pursue wild and exciting scenarios without it seeming incredibly dumb.
And honestly it’s implementation of Celestia losing her cool in response to internal and external threats and magically transforming into an evil version of herself is more interesting political gameplay than pretty much anything in actual HoI4
To be fair to Paradox: Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis also have a history of attracting far-right fans, but the development history of those titles doesn’t involve any noticeable pandering to people who think the wrong team won the Crusades. On the contrary, PDX has stubbornly gone on broadening the scope of both in ways that make them less right-coded.
But as our host say repeatedly over and over again, HoI4 is much much more successful economically. I guess money can buy you an ear.
Indeed, a meme in EU4 for a long time was “first, remove kebap” with more than a hint of anti-Turkish sentiment, and the “deus vult” crowd in CK is not negligible. But the people I’m talking about in HoI4 aren’t those who glorify military affairs in an abstract sense or who vaguely fantasize about some distant historical event happening differently. It’s those who believe that there’s a Jewish conspiracy that runs the world, or that modern liberal democracies are enacting a white genocide, or that women should be in the kitchen rather than the voting booth. Again, not a majority of HoI4 players, but a very noticeable minority which is far more prominent than in other PDX games; one that has a significant voice in the discourse around the game and so influences its development. Maybe it’s just that Neo-Nazis are more interested in an alt-history version of WW2 than of the 30YW; or maybe the mechanics of HoI4 appeal to them more (because it reinforces political beliefs); or maybe it’s just a statistical consequence of it having a much bigger player base to begin with. I’m not saying that Paradox as a company deliberately wants to make fascist games and to change gamers’ political views, only that they’re happy to take those people’s money by selling them DLC that tells them what they like to hear.
Paradox stands apart from smaller competitors precisely because it does more than just cater to that part of the market, but you are correct that those people are around. I’ve used the term “world conquest gamer” here before, because it’s not right-wing intellectuals; the problem players are people whose right-wing impulses are entirely libidinal but who prefer simulations of control rather than interpersonal direct violence, or at least are preferring it at whatever time they’re commenting on PDX message boards.
I think that section of the playerbase is equivalent to 40k’s “Black Templar Fans”* where a somewhat left-leaning company making a game where you can play facists in a wargame attracts facist fans whether they mean to or not, because many non-facists sometimes enjoy playing the bad guys so the mechanics are designed to allow that. And with the format of HoI Paradox has less opportunity to turn to the camera and say “Nazis are Bad” while 40k had a crazed berserker driven mad by brain implants replacing significant parts of his emotional regulation system and cursed/blessed by the Blood God tell the founder of the Black Templars “Not… As broken… as you” in a scene framed to imply he was 100% right.
That said, from what I hear Paradox isn’t as good at GW at forcing them off the platforms they control.
*this is not a universal description of people who like the Black Templars but it’s slang for a reason.
I don’t think you can play as good guys in WH40k. (good in the sense of our modern, not cosmic-horrified morality).
Tau?
Look good on the surface, yes, but by their second codex it was heavily implied they mind-controlled the Vespid, an early book indicated the Ethereals use phermones for mind control and while that wasn’t followed up on explicitly Tau sure are perfectly obedient to Ethereals until suddenly they’re physically separate for a long time and then they go rogue, and in general they’ll tell you that you have equal rights but if you publicly dissent against official policy no one will acknowledge the new family in your house didn’t always live there. And it’s overstated how often they do this but their Dark Crusade ending did report it’s believed they sterilized the population of Kronos as punishment for rebellion and whatever the truth of that the population did drastically collapse in the timeline where they won.
Also within the Tau they practice eugenics where reproduction is only with government-assigned partners of the same caste with zero regard for emotional connections and the kid is taken away to be raised communally. Of course for nonhuman aliens there could well be no issues with this, but while they haven’t made humans in their empire do it they have strongly hinted it’d be good if humans adopted the same system. And at least one planet regularly uses sterilization to control population growth although since this is only briefly mentioned it’s not clear whether this is mandatory or they ask for and get volunteers.
I’d actually put Craftworlders as the most moral major faction (except possibly Votann but they have barely any lore yet) but the part where nearly all of them don’t see the lives of humans as having any value whatsoever makes me reluctant to call them “good” like I would the mainline Protoss post-Tassadar’s sacrifice.
True, the best guys in 40k I describe as “If the Star Trek Federation were a George Orwell villain”.
But like I played the German Company of Heroes campaign, IIRC as an SS Panzer division, and I don’t think that makes me or the developers fascists (also played the allied campaigns, of course).
I don’t think Paradox want to make their game more fascistic to attract more fascists. They just made a game where war and violence decide everything so it naturally attract those who subscribe to that mindset.
HOI4 doesn’t really have a tool for you to oppress, ethnic-cleanse, genocide, enslave, discriminate… groups of people like CK, Victoria, EU, Stellaris have.
If I had to think a way to gamefy the advantages of democracies, whether they are pure ones or constitutional monarchies like the UK, over the autocracies of the time frame, one option to do so would be to introduce errors and mistakes, as well as consequences for them.
This is going to sound very counter-intuitive since the jank of Victoria II was talked about before and made inaccurate representations of the economic model, but exporting that jank to the field of politics can let players be hit with one of the wonders of democracy: the margin of failure.
Put bluntly, because democratic governments, in their myriad forms, have a lot of legitimacy and disseminate authority between various players, whenever the state makes a mistake or is hit with an unexpected issue, it doesn’t have to fear discombobulating itself out of existence since responsibility can be shared and diffused, allowing governments to take more sucker punches than an autocracy could, especially if the people can end up supporting the goals of the state.
By contrast, the totalitarian governments of WW2 essentially had to spend much efficiency in coup-proofing their regimes, to the point where their true performance was marred by the inability of tolerating errors and letting that harm the standing of the great leader. This is of course why Stalin was caught with his pants down when the Nazis invaded, why Mao’s China was consistently poor or all of the hell that Hitler unleashed.
So in short, the player would be trading away portions of their top-down power for the chance to do more with less hassle over having to spend most of their energy on holding to absolute power, to the detriment of everything else.
In HOI2, the slider system made it so that the most efficient and wealthiest setting was a full free market, fully Democratic country.
State led economies could produce the same thing repeatedly for cheaper, but free market ones had much cheaper unit upgrades and made more consumer goods.
Going to a full free market democracy was actually an optimal way to play the game as you would have lots of money and your army would be modernized very rapidly.
I do note that the allied powers are still fundamentally *pretty strong*. (even though they’ve been ahistorically nerfed to level the playing field) the USA has by far the largest number of starting factories in the game, f.ex. (as is historica!) and because of the way construction works that tends to compound quickly.
I haven’t played HOI4, but in general the politics of HOI2 seem a lot more realistic and functional than its sequel. You got a single slider push a year to slowly put your stat in the direction you want and changing governments was a very slow process. Democracies would have election events and random things would happen that you had to manage (including taking punishing dissent hits) to maintain your favoured policies, same with getting the ministers you’d want (who had their own ideological loyalties)
Up to a point that’s correct, becasue HOI2 largely avoided them. HOI4 has kinda piecemal and without much planning expanded into the sphere of the much more clearly “non-military” political, and that has caused issues.
I’d just straightforwardly give buffs to production, research, and public morale in the face of setbacks of any type for a simple implementation. Free Market democracies are just better at those things so long as the public agrees on a goal enough to lean into women doing Roise The Riveter and such. Paradox does this with Victoria, more or less, where liberalizing the economy and expanding the franchise takes away control but makes your factories more efficient in various ways either directly or through capitalists reinvesting and makes it easier to pass many of the stronger laws as well as keep from having uprisings from the lower classes angry about all the benefits of industrialization going to the upper classes. Victoria 2’s problem was just that the simulated capitalists were bad at math so they built things no real investor would have, but that’s an AI problem rather than a conceptual flaw.
TBH HOi4 *does* tend to have the allies be stronger economically (both because of their setup, and because of various bits and bobs) Eg both italy starts with some fairly significant economic debuffs that they need to fix (and in one of the more interesting examples, *you can’t fix all of them*) and Germany on the historical path saddles you with the “economy of conquest” mechanic that continously reduces your economic output (via increased “consumer goods” demands) and has to be fed by conquests.
Unfortunately the latter is a bit too easy to get around for a skilled player (there’s also an alternative german path that basically crashes your economy in 1936 and then has you rebuild it into a market economy with much better output, basically meaning you’ll be much less well prepared in ’39 but will hve a better time of it later)
Again, these are *theoretically* good ideas, but a combination of various issues means that it is often a bit too easy to just avoid the issues they are supposed to cause.
(The Soviet economy generally suffers from being good but inagile: Switching between producing different things tends to nuke your production efficiency becasue of various modifiers)
What I’m thinking of specifically is that since you can make the US Fascist the bonuses and penalties directly tied to the government form must be considered separately from everything else about the US. Of course with the focus tree controlling what happens on the path to Fascism in the US you could stick the fallout of becoming Fascist in there rather than putting it directly in the government form.
The simple solution is probably to give the democracies some sort of performance bonus meant to reflect the fact that they don’t purge anyone who makes himself a nuisance to the government. Like America gets +5% to Tanks or something because they’re the sort of place that lets Patton command an army instead of locking him up for being a fascist sympathizer.
Funnily enough they kinda do: The “Relief of Command” Officer corps spirit (only availible to democracies) gives apretty hefty bonus to army XP. (The equivalent communist spirit gives a small trickle of manpower, which is very strong for very small nations and basically useless for the USSR, and the fascist version gives cheaper conscription laws)
“If I had to think a way to gamefy the advantages of democracies, whether they are pure ones or constitutional monarchies like the UK, over the autocracies of the time frame, one option to do so would be to introduce errors and mistakes, as well as consequences for them.”
A simpler method – not better, but overall easier to implement – would be to just adjust the boni and mali accordingly. Civilization (6), funilly enough, seems to be doing a rather better job than HoI (a more “historical” game by reputation). Not a GOOD job by any means, as Democracy is underpowered there too, and Communism is very much overpowered, but at least Fascism is basically useless unless you’re going for domination. Again, not a perfect approach since fascism also wasn’t uniquely good at war (although I don’t completely subscribe to OGH’s view that it was uniquely bad either), but still, it seems that HoI actually goes out of its way to make democracies deliberately bad and autocracies good.
My recollection as someone who was never super-competent at Civ6 and hasn’t played it in years is that ideologies basically had a target victory condition with Democracy being the Space Race and Facism being Domination. And I can’t recall if Communism was specialized for a victory condition or if it was general production buffs, but if you aren’t doing the Space Race as your goal Democracy will feel underpowered. But it had policy cards and bonuses to emulate being the US in WW2 with the Arsenal Of Democracy card (wiki says it’s merged into the government in a DLC) simulating lend-lease by giving food and production bonuses to both ends of a trade route, and Their Finest Hour giving production bonuses to aircraft and in Gathering Storm combat bonuses defending your territory so you can win the Battle Of Britain. And more stuff along those lines. And all the governments get equal numbers of card slots with Democracy slanted towards economy.
So I think Civ 6 (and 5, which had the same concept implemented via its culture system) has the right general idea and any weakness of democracy is for game balance reasons where having one government be clearly the best at warfare *and* culture *and* faith *and* science *and* production would be no fun in a game that is informed by history but where any civ following its historical path is supposed to be able to win the game. So facism gets better immediate military bonuses so Germany taking it has a shot at Domination, Communism has production bonuses to reflect the genuinely impressive rapid industrialization of the USSR and China even despite the errors along the way (with the Great Leap Forward being represented by what happens when you take your citizens off food production to get more hammers) and Democracy gets science, Faith, Culture, and Diplomatic bonuses to reflect America leading in the Space Race in the end and managing to more-or less win a Culture victory in real life. And it has its cards and other bonuses themed after WW2 Allies you can drop in to get enough military bonuses to let your theoretically mostly a tier ahead military hold its ground against facism with good tactics and use of terrain and city defenses then push when you’ve ground down the invasion force.
And I’m sure the numbers could use tweaking, although I’d caution the balance target is giving players who don’t go on forums a reasonable challenge on the middle difficulties. The higher difficulties distort optimal strategies depending on the nature of the bonuses/penalties and AI changes. And I don’t ever play them myself because one of the distortions is needing a strong early military when I often play science-focused civs where having a wall with a single military district and a garrison unit can hold back a typical first AI war long enough for units pulled from garrison duty elsewhere and supplemented by emergency purchases to drive off the invasion and possibly take some territory with a couple catapults. I imagine democracy has similar issues in its era; I dunno about other people but on Prince I find a science rush eventually going Democracy that doesn’t stop before Mars the strongest strategy even for domination if you don’t completely forget Montezuma will attack you in the Classical Age (I, uh, have forgotten). The weaker numbers militarily are irrelevant when I’m hitting WW1 units with HIMARS.
“My recollection as someone who was never super-competent at Civ6 and hasn’t played it in years is that ideologies basically had a target victory condition with Democracy being the Space Race and Facism being Domination.”
Eh, kind of. In CivVI, out of the modern era governments, I’d say only Fascism was hyper-specialized and geared towards war, to the point that it couldn’t do basically anything else (unless you count just crippling everyone else and then winning because you bombed everyone back to the stone age). Communism was somewhat pushed towards science, but due to the production bonuses it could also do war well. While Democracy really was kind of “good at everything”, because its bonuses were spread accross gold income, production, growth and great people. For a game which really isn’t aiming for any level of true historical accuracy, and the balancing making all of them “good” to some extent notwithstanding, I actually find it captures the actual historical advantages of the respective form of government quite well (what it DOESN’T capture at all are the disadvantages, but hey, still better than HoI apparently :D).
“And I think that is a relatively fair description of the focus tree system’s approach to politics. Each focus declares, right on the tin, exactly what it will do and these choices never go awry – even the foci that can cause a civil war will have that clearly declared in their descriptions in advance. I find this particularly striking when it comes to industrial policy: just about every country has an industrial policy section of the focus tree, where in most cases they are merely selecting the “I would like more civilian and/or military factories 35 or 70 days from now” focus and letting it run.”
Perhaps the most extreme example is that, as the USA, the right wing/fascist path starts with reestablishing the gold standard and revolves around deregulation to end the great depression.
This would likely have immediately destroyed the economy. Just completely. Certainly it wouldn’t have helped recovery.
But instead it’s a marginally faster recovery, although it’s still slower than the socialist path which is faster than the new deal or deregulation, but results in a new civil war after you enact desegregation or the unions are given votes in Congress.
Basically, the game is unwilling to say “this was a bad idea and picking this is bad for you”. Everything on some level works. So any insane idea involving brutish application of state power is great.
I strongly disagree. The New Deal was counterproductive and restoring laissez-faire would have allowed the profit motive to encourage establishing new businesses. The real problem was the land rentiers who had no incentive to allow better use of their productive assets: see Henry George.
And you’re wrong.
I mean this generally and specifically, both as regards depressions in general and the great depression especially.
The issue with a depression economy is and was that there was no profit motive to economic activity because of deflationary economic trends. Money gained value more than investment, particularly early in the depression as gold standard linked deflationary forces were active, and this meant there was no market solution to the collapse; it had become rational to hoard money instead of buying capital. The market *broke*.
The solution was inflation. There needed to be more money so what existed lost value compared to capital. You create inflation by increasing the money supply, and once off a gold standard you can do that by spending money.
In terms of specifics, recovery began when FDR took office, ended the gold standard, and implemented the new deal. You can assert that this is unrelated, but the timing is perfect. Government spending and money creation went up, deflation stopped, production resumed.
The only reasonable alternative hypothesis is that the recovery was partially triggered by consumer sentiment that inflation would increase because of FDR, which caused increased spending as if the money supply increased, rather than or in addition to FDR actually increasing spending by employing people. Of course the actual spending still mattered because it built confidence, and the economists who argue this point generally agree that *more* spending would have *further* accelerated recovery. As it eventually did.
Specific policy wise, reinstating the gold standard has pretty much universally been panned by every economist as disastrous policy, particularly during economic downturns and especially historically during the depression. The few who argue for it are obviously wrong, or simply don’t care that it would be disastrous because what it does do is concentrate wealth. When the economy collapses rich money hoarders can wait to buy everything cheap, calling in farms and such as collateral for debts, establishing rents and accumulating ownership. They naturally accumulate more ownership of assets. This is in fact a natural way for a deflationary spiral to end; the offloading of the hoarded currency to buy capital once the economy has contracted to subsistence levels. But without a signal this can take an indefinite amount of time, and the end result is an increase in renters leading to a more stratified economy.
In other words the implementation of lassaiz faire policies alongside a gold standard during a depression rewards rent seekers. They hoard the gold then use it to buy everything up. This is technically an end to the depression, once every homesteader has been converted to a tenant farmer and now works to avoid eviction, but it’s not a good thing.
This also isn’t getting into the fact than the Republicans at the time were protectionists; the opening of trade was critical to ending the depression, and it was a new deal policy.
For all these reasons we can definitively say Landon would have been a disaster. Particularly as depicted in game.
And finally, the issue with applying a Georgist interpretation is that in the short term there were many small farmers who owned land whom a land value tax would have hurt, particularly as land assessment was imperfect, despite that long term it’s a good way to prevent rentier behavior (but this has no relation to lassaiz faire economics or the gold standard!). The immediate problem was monetary flow and the ensuring impact on labor and farming, and a longer term tax solution that failed to save people’s lives from starvation and deprivation in the short term was not in fact a long term solution. The least socially disruptive solution was spending to restart activity; tax reform could come later.
Very well put.
With a modern understanding of economics, we can say that quite a bit of the New Deal was counterproductive, and that better policies could have ended the Depression sooner… but the proposed alternatives at the time were worse!
My understanding is that the current economic consensus among people who aren’t just producing justifications for what they or their funders wanted to do anyway is that you should respond to a depression in a New Deal shaped manner, albeit I think with more giving bailouts and loans on generous terms and maybe mailing people checks rather than direct employment.
And the only good thing about the Gold Standard is that people trust it will remain valuable if the government basically collapses, and nowadays it’s kept as a backing reserve but no one owns enough gold to actually do a Gold Standard anymore.
“My understanding is that the current economic consensus among people who aren’t just producing justifications for what they or their funders wanted to do anyway is that you should respond to a depression in a New Deal shaped manner, albeit I think with more giving bailouts and loans on generous terms and maybe mailing people checks rather than direct employment”
Direct employment is kinda a point of contention. There’s a principal amongst western economists that the private market is more efficient, which is only occasionally actually subject to the ignominy of debate. When it is debated there are good and bad arguments, as with anything that has nuance. This in turn directly impacts arguments about how governments should function vis a vis spending versus employment; for example is it better for a government to contract private companies, or hire workers? The entire structure of modern government works via contractors and such, but there are a lot of reasons for that other than it being the best way to do things.
I’m not going to rehash all the arguments and biases here (the last time it blew up), but a lot of economists actually favor the government acting as an employer of last resort. They generally agree that some of the specific programs in the new deal were inefficient, but that if private enterprise is faltering (and any unemployment may mean faltering) the government should step in to push wages up by employing people.
“And the only good thing about the Gold Standard is that people trust it will remain valuable if the government basically collapses, and nowadays it’s kept as a backing reserve but no one owns enough gold to actually do a Gold Standard anymore.”
It’s notable that we argue such, but in every fiction we produce about collapse (zombies are popular) people don’t use gold. From an economics perspective the only things liable to actually hold value in such a circumstance are bullets and social capital. Armies secure all other goods.
And if we look at failed states, this is borne out in practice; failed states which maintain reserves of previous resources don’t always see holders if those resources become powerful, but rather whomever can seize them. Western interventions have a habit of being on the side of those who hold diamond, gold, oil, or gas mine ownership, and frequently *fail* because rebels on the ground simply seize the mines, and international force and pressure is insufficient to sway locals to abandon their leaders. This is it’s own deeply complicated topic, but it’s hard not to read it as relevant.
There is debate about how many people the government should employ overall, but at least the theory I’ve read and seen implemented to some success in 2008 and 2020 says if your goal is to just make sure people have the spending money to pull the economy out of a tailspin you want to keep them in private employment if practicaland just cutting checks to individuals is better than hiring them for make-work jobs.
Of course, the New Deal programs put people to productive use with stuff like building power plants that was good long term separate from raising employment.
As for gold holding value, it’s not about apocalypses but that the rebels who take the palace are unlikely to declare gold is worthless now and get everyone to agree, and if a government wants more money they can’t just print a billion tons of gold at will, which curbs inflation risk. Finally, if Zimbabwe was overrun by zombies or whatever people in the US would still buy gold from refugees.
Of course gold-backed paper only has these advantages so long as people think they can turn it in for the listed amount of gold, unlike physical gold coinage. As of now there isn’t enough gold in the entire world to assure people of this about dollars, but governments like to keep a bunch on hand basically so they can sell it for foreign currency if they need some in a hurry and no one will trade it for their fiat currency. You can do this with other stuff but enough gold for the purpose is a lot easier to store than most alternatives.
The US economy was substantially laissez-faire before the Depression and remained substantially laissez-faire under Hoover. If laissez-faire was going to get the economy out of the ditch, it would have already done so before FDR took office.
The hoover admin was the least laissez-faire admin in history. In particular, hoovers efforts to keep prices and wages high were hugely detrimental in a time when the money supply was falling.
This is literally nonsense. Hoover was extremely opposed to intervention. His few exceptions were compromises with the rest of his party; the tariffs he signed were written by committee, the farms acts he supported were limited in scope, and he opposed the major federal banking and finance regulations of his presidency for three years until early 1932. Hell, the “controls” you’re referring to were barely real, he was relying on voluntary collaboration with union and business leaders to try to keep wages high and prices stable. The only major intervention act he did implement by choice, the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929, was famous for being too weak because he didn’t mandate production limits on farmers; it was fixed by the Agricultural adjustment act which implemented *more* control.
Further his cabinet early in the depression were liquidationists, like Andrew Mellon who is quoted as having said-
“liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. … enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
The economic philosophy Hoovers administration embodied was to let the entire system collapse under the belief the economy would self correct. He only changed course when everyone of his advisors fled and his administrations approval reached barometric levels.
He was the most lassaiz faire president we have *ever had*, more than any gilded age poser, because he actually stuck to it for two and a half years of turmoil. And it *destroyed the country*. It was a *disaster*. He abandoned it only when society was in danger of collapse and he’d lost all political support. He was known to be non-interventionist and hated for it at the time, and today we know his policies were completely ineffectual because of how weak they were.
The only exception is the tariff act, which was precisely the wrong kind of intervention, and he wanted almost nothing to do with it-but was too weak to stop it. He let Congress add to his original limited farm tariff until it was an abomination, and he refused to veto it because then he’d be opposing his own party. He was so non interventionist he almost managed to do the right thing, but was so personally weak he failed at even doing nothing.
Whoever told you otherwise not only lied, they’re almost certainly doing so out of malice; they’re attempting to convince you of something that is precisely and comprehensively wrong so you’ll believe and do exactly the wrong thing. It’d be one thing to mention his *tariffs*, that’s rational but incorrect in context, but to mention the relief programs he *barely implemented* is wrong on every level. And to claim he stood out as an interventionist when the precise opposite is true is simply deranged.
Partly, I think, this is a general trend in Paradox games away from historical simulators toward historical sandboxes. A subset of the player base is drawn toward wild alt-history scenarios, and they have totally worn down PDX’s will to say “no, that’s ridiculous.”
In EUIV, for instance, the Hundred Years War was basically unwinnable for England for many years, and optimal England strategy was generally to get losing over with as quickly as possible so you could focus on taking over the British Isles and building a colonial empire- pretty reasonable, given that the game begins in 1444. But player interest in the alternative scenario was so strong that patches and DLC have not only made winning the HWY substantially easier but have also added a bunch of bespoke content for the resulting Anglo-French union. And this is far from the most ridiculous thing you can do in a fully DLC’d Paradox game that you couldn’t do at launch.
Personally I love doing wild alt history with great difficulty in Paradox games, like one of my favorite things to do in CK2 was to go Cathar and establish a de-facto matriarchial restored Roman Empire, with a run where I started as Charlemange and finangled inheriting the Byzantine Empire as well (believe it or not this came shockingly close to happening in reality; Charlemange proposed to marry Irene, who had gotten sole rule in her own right after blinding her son) and got the achievements for having three Empresses in a row and installing female clergy in every Pentarch seat at once.
I almost always do a custom equal or female dominated faith in CK3 too, but the fact that I can pretty easily do it on starting characters without even making it my primary focus ruins the fun for me. And I feel like outside of the Stellaris team Paradox has lost the skill to create fun difficulty since CK2, while Stellaris knows what fun looks like but can’t get the numbers right or get an AI that provides my desired target challenge level over the course of a game.
” CK2 was to go Cathar and establish a de-facto matriarchial restored Roman Empire, with a run where I started as Charlemange”
thanks, you gave me a great idea for a CK2 run 😉
Tricky part is that unless you use a Ruler Designer character you can’t just click an “I’m Cathar now” button when you don’t have any Cathars in your realm and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist at the game start. So I rarely set out to specifically do that and instead after Conclave I made a point of raising the Status of Women law as fast as research would allow.
But if you want to be Cathar specifically you’re looking for a Heresy event to fire, which become more frequent at lower Catholic Moral Authority, which basically goes up the better the pope is, gets 10% up to 50 total from held holy sites (IIRC you start with 3 of 5) and changes with various other events I can’t quite remember but would be on the wiki. But the big and easy one is each antipope absolutely tanks it and all you need for an antipope is to have the law that lets you appoint bishops rather than the Pope, which I’m pretty sure everyone in the first start date has at game start and a direct vassal bishop who likes you more than the Pope. If you can get another king to appoint an antipope too, possibly by getting him excommunicated before your own antipope, you drop moral authority so much just from that Catholicism will quickly devolve into heresies and you just have to wait for Cathar to fire in your realm and if you don’t get the event to convert immediately you can by getting the county, moving your capital to there, and making a decision.
And with Catholicism’s moral authority in shambles from other successful heresy outbreaks nuking its moral authority even after your antipope is no longer an antipope plus any other efforts you’ve made to sabotage it conversion will be rapid if you make a concerted effort to boost Cathar moral authority by taking holy sites. Once there’s a few more Cathar counties than Catholic counties suddenly Catholic is a Cathar heresy rather than the other way around, and the Holy Orders that will have been giving you trouble are Cathar now and the various other Cathars within and outside your realm are gonna be able to punch well above their weight and there’s other effects I can’t recall.
IIRC I managed to make Cathar the main branch within Charlemange’s lifetime when I happened to get lucky after appointing an antipope for unrelated reasons but depending on RNG it could be a while. Also be advised there is no Cathar Pope and you cannot change this so no actual Crusades. Roman Empire formation is as normal and marrying you or an heir to a Byzantine princess then assassinating her brothers until she’s on the throne is probably the way to go. Be aware that if you start Holy Warring for the Muslim-held sites this will start elevating Moral Authority. Also take a look at the Crusade unlock requirements; you want to avoid being on the recieving end of one early in your heresy and if an unrelated one happens (most likely after pagans make advances in Europe) it’s +10% moral authority on success and you may be unable to sabotage it.
The Hundred Years’ War in EU4 unfortunately suffered terribly from the fact the simulation couldn’t really handle the conflict.
It was not a war between England and France. It was a war between the King of England, as a claimant to the French throne, and the King of France. The English nobility were generally not very supportive of the Kings ambition here.
CK models this type of conflict, EU4 really struggles.
“the right wing/fascist path starts with reestablishing the gold standard and revolves around deregulation to end the great depression.”
That is the first time anyone has told me that 1930s fascists were in favour of deregulation.
There is a reason they were called totalitarians, and it is not that they were in favour of laissez-faire.
I cannot believe a computer game is misleading about 1930s political theory…
It’s nuanced. The depiction of America’s fascist path is mostly ahistorical, but it pushes on a few semi plausible buttons (albeit poorly).
The basic idea is that Alf Landon miraculously wins and then institutes a bunch of deregulation that favors American businesses over labor, and cutting taxes. This is a neutral democratic path. Politically this is probably best modeled by a theoretical schism between the southern and Northern Democrats, which was very unlikely but not impossible (as, historically, it happened later). But I’ll get to that.
Where this turns fascist is if he then allies with right wing demagogues like father Couglin and Martin Dies (incorrectly popularized as being McCarthy) to empower the anti communist right via the silver shirts and the HUAC. This leads to privatization of utilities, central planning of labor, and financial deregulation. Public-private partnerships, alongside labor suppression. Further supplementing this is first an expansion of the Chinese exclusion act, then a voter registration act. The last is ahistorical as that’s what we call the modern Republican push to seize federal control of elections, but some sort of poll act implementing federal poll tests *would* be more historical and do the same thing.
So it’s a shift from deregulation to cronyism, followed by political consolidation around the far right to manipulate public opinion, that switches the right wing path to fascism. This is reasonable in theory, a lot of right wing deregulation pushes go directly to cronyism with zero steps in between, but it’s more typical of later politics.
The issue is that the game plays exceedingly fast and loose with this. In a slightly more minor way it just freely takes laws from cold war and modern America and transplants them, and while there were similar trends the names are butchered. But a bigger stumbling block is FDRs coalition with the southern Democrats. A more realistic path goes back in time further and shatters this coalition, possibly by forcing the segregation issue and FDR alienating the south by taking a moral but unpopular stance opposing lynch mobs or segregation. This was already threatening to break the coalition in reality, and the communist party made strong in roads supporting accused blacks, so there were forces pulling FDR in both directions. Break the coalition and some alliance of fascist demagogues and a major party becomes much more plausible.
The US path actually splits immediately, (depending on who wins the 1936 election) into two democratics path (with largley shared foreign policy goals) then both of these paths have the option to cooperate with the extremes. (potentially causing a civil war) The economic paths are in both of these cases mostly within the democratic sphere. (eg. the New Deal stuff for the democrats and deregulation for the republicans) you then have the option to cooperate with either communists or fascists for various benefits. (and you can do this to some extent without triggering a civil war) doing this *too much* is what puts you on the fascists/communist path.
“Playing as a democracy in Hearts of Iron IV is essentially a ‘roleplay’ choice to accept limited mechanics for no real benefit.”
Well. Sortuve.
The one big benefit outside of specifics is diplomatic; if the USA or Britain doesn’t swap idealogy on an ahistorical part you might not have to fight them if you’re a democracy. This is the right choice 95% of the time.
The others are specific. A couple of democratic paths, particularly Japans, are much stronger long term. Usually this is because they give you the possibility of integrating other nations as cores, with the locals having citizenship instead of being slaves like under fascist paths. Core states both provide more factories and building space, and also provide astronomically more manpower; the default non core military manpower is 2% that of cores, increasing to maybe 10% under specialized builds.
Japan in particular can get something like doubled construction speed and then core everything in Asia by installing puppets that enter its economic sphere, under the guise of decolonizing and democratizing the area. In essence the democratic path turns Japan into a multicultural democratic union of all Asia (I don’t think it actually has new elections in game though), which means by the end of the game it’s theoretically possible to end up with the entire population of india, China, indonesia, etc. united under an economy which has miraculously increases in size by a factor of twenty through old fashioned building.
That version of the nation formerly known as Japan, the “what is the Asian co prosperity sphere was a real, earnest thing” is the strongest possible version, by far. You have effectively infinite growth, building space, and manpower. I don’t think the axis version can never fully utilize China, even if conquered, as it’s not core territory; you certainly can’t core India or the rest of Asia.
There are other examples that are similar, such as the Roman European Union path, which ends up with a democratic fully cored union from Moscow to Morocco. To get there you need to turn Italy into a constitutional monarchy with a democratic king, whom then declares Rome reborn and extends citizenship to everyone in the Mediterranean without mind of race or creed, before integrating western Europe and forming the EU which further cores all of central Europe. And you can do all of this with effectively no limitations from being a democracy; your monarch gets a bunch of very good traits from giving himself titles and never leaves, as you don’t have elections, and you also can declare war and such freely because Rome bypasses those restrictions.
Now I’m not sure precisely what it says about the authors that the strongest European democratic path is a multicultural Roman empire which is a democracy in name only, while the strongest Asian democratic path is a multicultural customs union formed out of the reforged corpse of Japan, but it’s certainly something.
Paradox has occasionally said out loud that intentionally the most optimal paths in their games involve MAXIMUM MULTICULTURALISM that lets you make full use of all your citizens as long as you can manage to implement them. Victoria 3 makes this particularly obvious where it’s just objectively the best citizenship law and the only reason not to do it is that I don’t think even the intellectuals will vote for it without the right leader. Likewise, in Stellaris unless you have a Genocidal or other such special civic to amp up ethnostates or slave societies you mostly want to give everyone full citizenship so long as you can manage the stability hit from people who don’t like your government having enough Political Power to matter, while Authoritarian is good for conquest because you can send in some rulers who count at x10 their number for impacting stability to keep a lid on the angry newly conquered people who hate authoritarians but it’s generally agreed to be weaker compared to full citizenship once you’ve settled the unrest from conquests. Stellaris-specific exceptions exist relating to stuff like if you’re doubling down on being Clone Army you only want your clones in the admiral pool because they’re just objectively the best but it’s the general rule.
For Rome, Paradox just does Rome DLCs in every game they make that let you restore the Roman Empire/Republic. It’s part of the brand by now. Often acknowledged to be wildly ahistorical in official release notes. It may specifically be a reference to a big mega-campaign by Wiz on the SomethingAwful forums way back in the day where during Victoria 1 due to the way the campaign had developed since 1066 Byzantium had remained a big player and experienced a massive communist uprising and he put in some events to have it become the Union of Rome and merge with Communist Italy to be a main player allied with the Democratic People’s Republic Of France in Hearts of Iron, I think 2 but may have been 1. He got hired by Paradox as a scripter a long time ago and I don’t remember his exact role as of recently but he’s a high-up leader on events for I think multiple games. Of course it’d be more specifically a reference if it were the commie path
For Japan that’d just be that they wanted to give Japan an alt-history non-Axis path since they’re one of the key participants and once they leave the bounds of stuff that was remotely likely it can get wild.
“Victoria 3 makes this particularly obvious where it’s just objectively the best citizenship law and the only reason not to do it is that I don’t think even the intellectuals will vote for it without the right leader.”
They keep adding unique twists to the idealogies to represent different national interest groups, but at release only the Sikh soldiery and sovereignist colonial minorities were idealogically pro multiculturalism. This meant that the jobs of characters would never align to produce multicultural interest groups. As the interest groups are the primary political blocks in your nation that made multiculturalism hard.
That leaves character traits as being the only way to establish multiculturalism. Characters would start political movements which override the populations default idealogies, and could assume leadership of an interest group to convert to their idealogy as long as they were in charge.
There were this only wo paths to stably produce characters with these traits; have enlightened despots (there are three varieties that work) or have an anarchist revolution. Resolving the historical situations around these traits correctly will trigger your political leaders to have these traits more often.
This is, incidentally, also a somewhat authoritarian theory of history. The interests of a nations political groups are largely culturally determined by heritage, and almost universally bigoted, but can be overridden by political manipulation? It’s at least not trivial like in hoi4, but it’s working from a related theory of politics. One that accepts force *or* socialist anarchism as valid drivers of tolerance, but not much else.
“Stellaris-specific exceptions exist relating to stuff like if you’re doubling down on being Clone Army you only want your clones in the admiral pool because they’re just objectively the best but it’s the general rule.”
Or converting everyone to your primary species template, vis a vis robotics or various cybernetic or other assimilation paths. You generally wanted to have those people, their forms were more…negotiable.
Nos broadly I don’t actually disagree with how paradox depicts the various conquering multicultural empires in hoi4. The basic message is that the exclusionary empires struggle to use captured territory because they don’t consider the population citizens, making the paths that don’t care about that much better. Further there’s more than enough room to convince yourself that it’s right and just to go on a campaign of economic or military hegemony to conquer the world, given that the people otherwise running it are liable to be fascists, authoritarian communists, or monarchies.
The issue is that in order to really explore that the game needed to start in 1920 and have much more politics, like Victoria 3 does, if you wanted anything like that to have the slightest relationship to reality. This is the original sin here; a lot of the interesting political idealogies made much more sense even ten years before game start, and some sort of “want of a nail” type poke could plausibly realign the world, but compressing the timeline means that the political situation needs an authoritarian view of power to function. That’s what irrevocably ruins the versimellatude of the games politics, and it can’t be fixed without implementing what is fundementally a different game timeframe.
It’s been pointed out that for all that stellaris gets memed as the Genocide game, the vast majority of people play some variety of xenophile egalitarians.
My general impression is that for most games, and I suspect this includes HoI, people enjoy doing Evil runs in which they do everything they know they/their government shouldn’t do in real life on occasion and they love talking about the crazy stuff they do on those runs but if they do one playthrough usually it’s the Good or Neutral path assuming this is a game where the choices are clear enough to pick a path without a guide* and if they do ten playthroughs the vast majority are good.
I’m definitely that way in Stellaris; I’ve done runs as every variant of Genocidal and all ethics, but insofar as I have a preferred empire it’s Task Force Coppelion, Fanatic Xenophile Pacifists with a Tomb World start and a democratic government whose standard plan is to form a federation of everyone who can be convinced to join, enable free migration within it and make as many external pacts as I can afford to maintain, almost never do offensive wars except against genocidals, never take Colossus, always take Defender Of The Galaxy, and when I do get in a war usually I subjugate as a vassal and any conquered species get Full Citizenship and Decent Conditions (sometimes upped when I have the consumer goods) immediately, and I do bio-ascension with the RP that like the Coppelion in the manga that inspired this empire the Coppelion were genetically engineered to be immune to radiation before game start and are culturally inclined to get further upgrades voluntarily and the like 2% of the population who don’t want to adopt a new genetic template don’t have to.
My only deviation is that once I’m ready to rumble I intentionally piss off a Fallen Empire via settling a Holy World or something so I get to steal their tech and get their sweet sweet homeworlds while making their pops get real jobs to be positioned to lead the League Of Non-Aligned powers to victory. I also generally get permanent Custodian with all the fixings but not Galactic Empire basically to get as close as the system allows to a galaxy-wide federated government with the Task Force as first-among-equals responsible for leading the defense against Awakened Empires and the Crisis as well as any regular empires that are genocidal, doing a Crisis Perk, or otherwise can’t be permitted to continue independently and must regrettably be compelled to become equal partners in the Task Force.
Manga is sci-fi about the Coppelion going into the radioactive ruins of Tokyo officially as search-and-rescue but it eventually turns out the head researcher on the project wanted to sell super-soldiers immune to radiation to allow actually winning a nuclear war and is using Tokyo as a tech demo (and with the X-men level powers they’ve got some could legit survive being caught in the open during a nuclear blast). Both the traits and behavior are inspired by Ibara, the main protagonist. I have two secondary empires using the species, the Second Years (in Japanese as best I could figure) who are Inward Perfectionists based on the class in the Manga who get drastic powers as soon as they enter Tokyo like one constantly emits neutron radiation that kills any non-Coppelion in minutes even with the best protective suits available and who just wanted to be left alone in the virtually empty city, and the Cleanup Crew, as Fanatic Purifiers who in the Manga were twins derived from the DNA of a woman who turned out to be a serial killer due to heritable mental illness and basically started out thinking if they killed enough people the voices would stop.\
But my go-to default conquest empire is the Wrought Protectorate, based on an idea for a sci-fi setting I have never been able to make the necessary aliens to do even a short story for. They’re Xenophile Egalitarian Militarist Clone Army, always Ascendant, which is basically the backstory I had thought up before the Clone Army Origin was added. Basically they were genetically engineered soldiers fighting for Earth in a war that ended with natural humans exterminated and they opt to form a new interspecies MAXIMUM REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT in which they’re a de facto warrior caste with the exact same voting rights as anyone else and their foreign policy is “democracies we cool, everyone else, you are being liberated, please do not resist”.
And I’ve cycled through just about every origin and every ethics combination depending on my mood and taken a crack at every Crisis Perk but I keep coming back to Task Force and Protectorate and I think that most players are similar.
*In Shin Megami Tensei, there’s Law and Chaos endings that usually respectively so authoritarian you can’t breathe differently than YHVH wants you to and the war of all against all, then one or more Neutral endings where human spirit overcomes both angels and devils which are clearly the best outcome for humanity but may require balancing hidden Law and Chaos meters to hit the middle using choices with unknown impact sizes and almost always involves fighting both final bosses of the other routes, generally absent divine/infernal backup you’d have in the respective routes. Most people want this ending but only get it via using a walkthrough, which they usually don’t do the first time through.
Yeah. Tbh i would argue the japanese democratic path is probably straight up the strongest japanese path, and one of the strongest paths period in the game. for 200 something Political power you can fully core any asian nation, including All of Russia. You don’t even need to conquer stuff to core it. In a recent run of mine Manchukuo (which usually harbors the fleeing fascists and is your first hurdle) went Democratic and was in a defensive war against NA China. So literally just helped them out and invited them to my faction +200 pp = All of china cored in 1940. other Japan paths can take out china faster by virtue of not doing a Civil war but instantly getting cores on all of it pretty much as soon as the war is over is insane.
This seems like the actual answer, even irl. Despite what our host repeatedly say in this article, there are many actually authoritarian countries in cold war that ultimately succeeds, solely because they’re aligned with “the good guys”. I’m still wondering what exactly is the magic key that USA can give to bless or curse a country, but it does seem to exist.
Oh, that’s not a mystery. It’s cheap loans and military aid. The cheap loans let the rulers maintain control of their inner circles via rewarding supporters with fancy shit, and the military aid means that they aren’t easily dislodged by revolutionaries.
Each flows into the other via various public-private partnerships, for example a loan to build oil infrastructure in partnership with Exxon means a fancy contract for the rulers cousin, whom runs the government labor ministry. And because American businesses are involved any attempt by those who aren’t given a split of this pie to, you know, not starve to death, becomes a communist uprising. Obviously this theoretical country now needs a bunch of gunships and rifles and tanks and such, which the ruler can promptly use to secure control over the oil fields and maintain his power base.
Oh, and it just so happens that the American senator whose committee approved this military aid also appointed the monetary fund chair who approved the loans, and it just so happens both (and their committees) get cushy chairmanship positions on Exxon or defense contractor positions as consultants.
That’s how the American system works to reward authoritarian countries. It’s been churning since just after ww2; Eisenhower commented on the dangers in abstract.
Essentially as a result of being a free market, relatively inclusive compared to Nazis, mostly democratic country the US is rich and good at science and when the President convinces the public a war is important willing to stubbornly stick it out through catastrophes.
This isn’t magic and as we’re seeing right now a bad President can totally squander these advantages but when they do during a crisis there’s a new President within four years at most and various civil rights mean they can’t do a Great Leap Forward (yet and hopefully forever). Hence the strong track record and ability to backstop useful foreign dictatorships.
People keep thinking they can replicate that success while having tighter central control but it’s yet to quite work out for anyone. The current PRC is making a go at it, helped along by importing and/or stealing US technology, but the demographic scars of the ill-thought-out One Child Policy mean a true Chinese Century looks unlikely unless AI delivers on the hype and produces such a fundamental change to society all previous models are irrelevant. And I suspect even with that if the PRC remains politically as it is their AI will be hobbled by the fact the government won’t let it say things that contradict the party line and eventually this will come back to haunt them somehow or other even if they run away with a lead in it for a few decades.
Sounds nice but as I have already remarked in this thread – such theories cannot be considered robust if they fail to account for France. I.e. in the 1860, it had the same per capita industrialization levels as the US, and 25% larger than what would soon become Germany. By 1913, while its per capita industrialization still grew (tripling, in fact), it was now half that of the US, and a third less than Germany (as well as still a little below the British level in 1860). Notably, France had been a democracy for most of that period also* – yet it got leapfrogged by the unquestionably more authoritarian Germany.
I think it was last year when I remarked on here that the load-bearing assumption for a lot of such analyses is that only democracies (and often, only “Western countries”) can pursue and sustain expansive immigration policies. We are about to see that theory put to its greatest test in these next few decades. All the more so since one of the greatest push factors, the difficulty of learning Mandarin for prospective migrants, is rapidly vanishing in the single continent which is about to remain the largest remaining source of net outward migration for the 21st century.
https://www.dw.com/en/africa-chinese-language-courses-nigeria-abuja-v2/video-74242937
Furthermore; the recent polling on how countries feel about the US and how they feel about the PRC is quite grim for any proponent of theories like yours. Essentially, another load-bearing assumption is that electing “a normal President” is going to result in an almost immediate and marked reversal to the levels of 1990s or 2010s (or at worst, 2000s). If we instead see only a slow and halting recovery – and a failure for pro-PRC sentiment to drop (i.e. if not just comparatively nearby countries like Indonesia and Thailand, but also places like Mexico and Greece (!) continue to have majority positive approval of it in the 2030s), then we’ll see how many locks “the magic key” could still open.
*Barring the final decade of Napoleon III’s rule – half of which had coincided with the US Civil War anyway) and given e.g. Jim Crow, one might even make the argument it was more democratic than the US. Granted, that would only work when excluding Algeria and the other colonies from the consideration – but then again, the US also had the Philippines and the like.
I’ll freely admit the US also benefits from having a huge resource rich territory with no meaningful threat of a land invasion but I think as the South before the Civil War demonstrated it is completely possible for a less liberal society, even a sub-part of the US, to squander that. And a culture of free inquiry is critical to the science bit.
On immigration, unless the PRC majorly reforms I do not think they will match the immigration the US historically had, and even if they do the coming demographic lean towards a huge retired population will hit them much harder than if they hadn’t done the One Child Policy, although everyone major is facing down some version of the same issue.
As for your arguments about not getting back to normal after Trump, I am in fact worried that the global impact of electing him for a second term and thus demonstrating he wasn’t a freakish aberration can’t be undone, but I didn’t say America specifically would retake hegemony for a reason. Could very well end up simply not having a hegamon post-2050, or if the wave of far-right parties is fended off in Europe a France/Germany/Britain led NATO with the US maybe still the biggest member but disgraced from leadership could be it.
Or maybe South America and Africa are able to assert themselves as the US and PRC falter and Egypt is master of the world in 2100 at the head of the African Union if there’s another Arab Spring.
Or if India sorts out its internal political divisions they’re huge too and speak English.
Or AI is a complete phase transition and history is zero guide but I suspect countries willing to let it tell them what they don’t want to hear will have the edge if we design an AI capable of reliably telling the truth.
But anyway I think governments not accountable to their citizens tend to make critical errors long-term as they get an incompetent successor who can’t be voted out and inherently stifle innovation. And yes, a democracy can elect an idiot too but Trump is legally going to be gone in 2029 and I am doubtful we’ll get as big an idiot any time soon unless he does a successful coup. Like I said not magic but advantageous.
This seems axiomatically true – yet conflating this premise with political systems does not necessarily work. If you pick up, say, a physics textbook and flip through its glossary, you’ll find a substantial proportion of terms which have Russian last names attached to them. (I.e. Cherenkov radiation or Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation.) Virtually all of those discoveries took place either in the Russian Empire or in the USSR. Nowadays, the PRC plays a massive role in all kinds of science.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(26)00084-X/fulltext
To speak from personal experience: the names of researchers from PRC institutions are on a lot of papers I have had to read just to keep up with my field (environmental/climate science). Mostly on co-authors, yes, and more on “building block” papers rather than the “blockbusters”, but the trend is clear. This trend is about to be amplified beyond belief, as the present-day Trump Administration is absolutely wrecking its climate science (Look up what is happening with NCAR, NOAA or even something as fundamental as an Argo float network), with damage that would take many years to reverse. At this point, no-one besides the PRC really has the capacity to step in (there’s an instructive graphic somewhere where e.g. the entire EU research funding is a small fraction of what the US had been cutting from its research since 2025), so across the globe, more and more of us would need to turn to them.
There would have virtually certain also been billions of additional tons of CO2 in the atmosphere and untold species going extinct if they hadn’t done it so…I’ll echo Zhou Enlai’s “it’s too early to tell” (mis)quote for now. I’ll also note that right now, they have the opposite problem if anything (that of significant youth unemployment), which could well have been worse in the policy’s absence. (I say “could” not “will” because lump of labour is a fallacy – but that doesn’t mean the opposite is always true). It is also plausible that if they are at significant youth unemployment now, the declining population would place them at “market-optimal” levels well before heading into detrimental ones.
Egypt does have 100 million people – as well as a much, much stronger military than most people are aware of (on paper, it would beat just about any EU country if they somehow ended up in a “1 vs. 1”; though their “soft factors” are admittedly not believed to be there). However, it is also massively dependent on Russian grain to sustain those 100 million people and I’m not sure there’s much that could foreseeably change its import dependence. (African agriculture is due to have a lot of productivity improvements trickle down to it – but those would also struggle just to keep up with the impacts of climate change.)
It could also be that the difference between massive data center models and ones that can be run individually narrows to the point everyday people only need the former and data center buildout would only matter for the insane god-building stuff (the literal beliefs of Anthropic in particular). In that case, it would be a bit like mobile phones got invented in the 1920s/1930s – approximately at a point the bulk of the US landline network was completed at a great expense. Then, “The Magnificent Seven” that are now the cornerstone of the US economy take an enormous hit (at least one would probably cease to exist) and the US falls further behind.
Logical enough; though I would offer a complementary interpretation here. To me at least, it appears plausible that the democracies have a “floor” which stops them from committing the truly enormous errors like yes, the Great Leap Forward, or the cancellation of NEP, or Burma’s currency reevaluation based on numerology. At the same time, they also have a “ceiling” as any good policy is an potentially an election away from being cancelled/reversed – and the way parties work means that ideological approaches are kept alive within them even when they no longer make sense in the real world. After all, the choice of different parties generally only makes sense if they offer to do different things. (Technically, the UK had recently shown us with Starmer to get elected in large part by promising to do the exact same things but better – and it had also shown us that doesn’t really work.)
The thing is, if there’s a fairly clear right answer to a major policy question, democratic politics still encourage at least one party to adopt the opposite to appeal to people who think differently. Moreover, parties and their hangers-on also get to shape opinion and so they can re-inject false approaches in the political bloodstream potentially indefinitely. “MAHA” had perhaps been the most dramatic example, but I think there are plenty others if you pay attention. And, logic would suggest that over time, a clear right answer would be found for more and more issues; so an autocracy which can simply commit to stick to every one of those right answers, indefinitely, would have an advantage over a democracy which has an inescapable policy drift. This is all theoretical, of course, and I doubt it can be “proven” within foreseeable future; but I am not sure if it can be disproven either.
P.S. The “American Century/Pax Americana” had, like the “Imperial Century/Pax Britannica” before it, only really been described/agreed-upon in hindsight, so even thinking about these labels now is a bit silly.
On science, autocracies can certainly do it, until the autocrat doesn’t like the answers he’s getting. Or the funding isn’t there for investigating something that seems unimportant but is the key to a breakthrough. And on the current US administration I consider them openly authoritarian and unconstrained by the laws set to keep the government democratic so I don’t see them as a point against the idea of democracy but a result of a failure mode of a US Constitution whose framers didn’t think through how a party system would function.
And my take on autocracies always picking the right answers is that firstly it will be “right” for the autocrat but not necessarily for everyone else, and secondly just as a democracy is one election away from Trump an autocracy is one death away from Mao, except there isn’t another election in four years.
As for the plausibility of Egypt, yes they’d need to resolve their import dependence but we’re clearly at a time of global transition and maybe by 2100 Russia has basically collapsed and the grain-growing regions are Egypt’s de facto vassals or something. Still, my actual bet would be China is temporarily dominant in its local area (but not so outside of Asia for various reasons including that their navy isn’t designed to be) then either demography catches up to them or their current political balance shifts drastically, and if NATO hasn’t come apart in an actual shooting war over Canada or something it reasserts primacy although possibly with a different leadership and formal treaty. Then by 2100 technology, climate, etc have shifted too much to make predictions with the slightest bit of confidence except that it looks like we’re in for enough warming we’re gonna have to resettle a lot of people.
Frances situation in that period is complex. But at its core this is largely a mirage; if you compare gdp per capital then France is consistently top ten, behind Britain, the low countries, Switzerland, and at times even with Germany. They were plenty productive per person.
What changed is that it stopped having more people.
This is partially because the Napoleonic code centralized a form of equitable inheritance. Now this is only part of it as Belgium and parts of Germany also used the code, but it particularly influenced farm inheritance in France. Larger plots were divided into unprofitable small ones. The French adapted by having fewer kids. Instead of one family member inheriting and three leaving to the city, one family member inherited the entire plot*.
This wasn’t a forced reaction to the code, though. If the French had continued having kids at the prior rate they would have had to shed excess labor to the city or develop more efficient farming. Both were results in Germany and Belgium to the same code. The typical explanation is education, as French families, particularly women, had access to education that told them how to prevent or abort pregnancy earlier due to more liberal laws and better education. There’s also an idea that the French were more culturally open to sexual experiments that don’t result in children; homosexuality and unconventional sex, for instance.
Another impact is that France lost the Napoleonic wars, which severely damaged it’s population. Further deaths in the Franco-Prussian war didn’t help.
Regardless the French gdp per capita didn’t really decrease in relation to their neighbors, except Germany, their relative population did. This naturally decreased their relative industrial and manpower edge, but didn’t cause the country to become a backwater or anything. They still produced scientists, artists, and inventors, contributing to society writ large significantly. The French just weren’t as economically, politically, or militarily dominant.
What remains is why other countries, in particular Germany and Britain, did so comparatively well. For Britain the answer is almost certainly their empire; most of the world was bent to the task of increasing British gdp for a century, and while France had colonies its colonies (outside of haiti, which they lost) were less profitable. For Germany it was a combination of good natural resources (iron and coal) and often quite good central leadership by Bismarck and his successors.
Hence the better point of order is not that France didn’t grow, but that Germany and Britain did. Their success directly contradict the concept that democracies were better at growth, as the imperial part of Britain’s empire was certainly not democratic and Germany had a complicated relationship with democracy at best. A good supplement to that point is that the Soviets, under very centralized and usually authoritarian politics, were able to industrialize to superpower status over the course of the 20th century. There’s more nuance, for instance Britain’s colonialism crippled its colonies growth for only marginal relative improvements domestically, but the point stands that it’s not simply that democracy is a secret sauce.
*This is a simplification. In reality two other aspects, female inheritance and the ability to set aside part of the estate for directed inheritance complicate matters. The first part just means that, on average, one son and one daughter will divide a plot. This eventually averages out to one family per plot once multiple different families marry though. The second complication was sometimes used as a rider for the older sibling to take care of the surviving parent, I.e. take care of your mother and you’ll inherit an extra part of the plot. It doesn’t actually change matters; the population was generally kept at replacement level with very little extra natural growth as a result of the overall law.
@YARD and @guy,
To speak from personal experience: the names of researchers from PRC institutions are on a lot of papers I have had to read just to keep up with my field (environmental/climate science).
I work in plant ecophysiology, and this is absolutely the case in my field as well. Perceptibly much more so than even, say, 10 years ago. China is, at least as far as topics relevant to my work go, the most quantitatively important center of scientific research in the world.
As far as Russia and the Soviet Union go, it’s also worth remembering that at their peak in (I think) the early 1970s, about 20% of the total papers published in the world were in Russian. Obviously that collapsed when the Soviet Union imploded, and never recovered since largely because the current Russian regime doesn’t appear to much care about science. China is of course very different.
On science, autocracies can certainly do it, until the autocrat doesn’t like the answers he’s getting. Or the funding isn’t there for investigating something that seems unimportant but is the key to a breakthrough.
So, I’d say, first off, that while that might or might not be true:
1) “autocracy” is a failure mode of states like China and the communist states back in the day, it’s not the model along which they’re intended to work. The intended model is the party state, where decisions are made and society is governed by a single party, not a single man. The party state has its pros and cons as well, but they’re distinct and different from the pros and cons of a personal dictatorship, as well as the pros and cons of a liberal regime. In particular, decisions about science and among other things would be made collaboratively within the party rather than depending on one or a few people.
2) you could say the same thing of a liberal society like the United States- science can flourish right up until it runs up against answers that the people as a whole (if the emphasis is on the liberal-democratic aspect), or the capitalist class (if the emphasis is on the capitalist aspect), or some powerful interest group like, say, the evangelicals or the GMO skeptics or the climate change deniers (if the emphasis is on the day to day pressures of electoral politcs). It’s probably true that, for most of the 20th c, science and technology had so much prestige in the US (due to their concrete and obvious achievements in making life more pleasant, safe, and healthy) that scientists were mostly left alone to pursue their research in peace, even when it came to controversial issues like global warming, or environmental health, or evolution. That consensus has broken down now, and I’m not sure it’s coming back in the foreseeable future.
3) In any case, whatever theoretical arguments you or I might make back and forth, the fact remains that China just *is* currently outproducing the US in many scientific fields, and looks like it’s going to be on track to pull even further ahead in the next 10-20 years. Maybe in the long run your faith in liberalism will pan out and China will flame out, maybe not, but it certainly doesn’t look likely any time soon.
See, in the US if the capitalists or the public or interest groups don’t like science that hampers its implementation in politics but until recently you could get grants and publish papers regardless.
In the USSR this happened:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
And I’m aware China is doing a lot of science, but I’ll note that AI is clearly a big deal even with its limits and the foundational paper of the Transformers architecture was published by Google. And it’s that which is the thing I think liberal democracies are better at.
As for publication numbers China has a way larger population than the US so I’m unsurprised it has more scientists, a good many who attended US universities (had an exchange student neighbor in college although I didn’t ask if he was PRC or Taiwanese). And you get a much higher rate of scientists moving from the PRC to the US than vice-versa which I count under the advantages of democracy.
And yes Trump is ruining that but I consider that part of a complete breakdown of democracy into autocracy so I actually think it supports my point while proving my adage that “laws aren’t real” and no words on paper can stop a government from doing something if the right people want it to.
On the party state thing, yeah that’s the theory, but not usually the practice.
@Terry; this was really informative, thanks! I did hear of the French birth rates declining earlier than in the rest of their neighbourhood (both in the peasant series here, and perhaps somewhere else) but I have not made the Napoleonic code connection before! Not sure I have anything else to add at this point.
@guy:
To expand on Hector’s point: the notion democracies had been immune to this does not really stand up to scrutiny. Scopes Monkey Trial took place in a democracy – and it was triggered by a preexisting ban on the teaching of evolution, which remained in place in the state of Tennessee for nearly half a century. Even in recent years, major Republican figures who have denied evolution included Ben Carson, Mike Pence and Mike Johnson (who had once blamed school shootings on a belief in “life emerging from primordial slime”.) Likewise, the Republican climate denial long predates Trump – I recall most of Romney’s primary opponents in 2012 failed to accept it. That same year, North Carolina banned mentions of sea level rise in official state documentation (over in Florida, DeSantis followed suit a decade later, and there are probably examples in other states also.)
This sounds obvious – until one wonders what were the times of stability/no transition/you name it to contrast the present with. One does not need to look all that closely to detect some sort of a phase shift affecting vast fractions of the global population in just about any decade out of the 100+ years at the very least. (i.e. the World Wars, the Great Depression/GFC, decolonization, Yom Kippur oil shock, the end of the USSR, etc.)
Moreover; this appeal undercuts a number of your other points, including the Lysenkoism one.
Mao did not get to where he was because his predecessor died (quite the contrary, in fact), but as the result of a whole war (or several, depending on how you rank the odds of Mao managing to win if Japan had for whatever reason refrained from invading – and if the broader WWII hasn’t occurred in a way which ensured the Allies became committed to total Japanese defeat.) Your theory is that leaders who could do actions akin to the Great Leap Forward or Lysenkoism are a stable elements of non-democratic states: mine is that they could be more of a transitory one, and we ought to distinguish between the “founding fathers” of states and those leaders who rise through the ranks of an existing system.
While we don’t have that many examples in the post-industrial period to draw upon (especially if the last few non-ceremonial monarchies are excluded), it does seem like once a non-democratic system is secure enough for an agreed-upon succession process, that process is much more biased towards leaders who wouldn’t rock the boat too much – at least, I cannot think of “second-generation+” authoritarian leaders doing anything quite as radical or disastrous as what the “first generation” founders have frequently ended up doing.
It’s worth noting here, that the PRC specifically does have leader elections with fixed term lengths – they are just conducted within the National People’s Congress (whose representatives are themselves elected by local People’s Congresses). For several decades, there have also been term limits; they are gone under Xi, but it’s an open question if his successor would enjoy the same deference or if the institution would reassert itself. (In another example, Cuba appears to have managed a fairly orderly transition from the Castro family within the existing system a while back.)
That Lancet editorial I linked just earlier did in fact note “A neglect of curiosity-driven research risks overlooking transformative unexpected discoveries.” Yet, making a breakthrough does not guarantee you would be the one to capitalize on it and vice versa; just consider how none of the technology behind an iPhone had been new or invented by Apple; on the contrary, they had the second mover advantage, and the rest is history. The PRC is arguably in a similar position: an enormous cadre of qualified scientists and engineers provides a lot of semi-“idle” capacity that can be thrown to expand upon any breakthrough, no matter where it had originated at first. I.e.
And now consider that DeepSeek had emerged a mere 25.5 months after ChatGPT. Being the first to discover something arguably means less than ever before.
Well, if we discuss this in terms of “rates”, we’ll probably find a larger flow from the Western states towards the Gulf than vice versa. After all, the latter appears to produce few scientists, ofc, but it does manage to lure quite a few; I have definitely seen some papers by researchers with European names, but who were affiliated with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and the like. (That place is currently led by an Australian neuroscientist, Sir Edward Byrne.) It’s a fair question how much of the democracy advantage would persist once you weigh for income disparities.
Doesn’t this contradict your own words regarding e.g. “the wave of far-right parties in Europe”? Not to mention e.g. Latin America (i.e. I don’t think the Brazilian Constitution has much relation to the American one, yet it appears the country is about to see its second Bolsonaro President in a decade, in spite of everything which ought to have sunken that possibility. Unfortunately, that would be closer to the rule than the exception for South America nowadays) or the Philippines (which had in recent years went from electing Duterte on an explicit promise of mass violence to electing the scion of the Marcos regime).
I did not say “always”: in fact, I said that they while they often pick (much) worse answers (“lower floor” – especially when noting that functional autocracy is often an unintentional failure state of a system, as Hector noted), there might also be a potential to move past the baseline of wrongness that’s seemingly inescapable for democracies (“higher ceiling”). Note your own words just earlier: “if the wave of far-right parties is fended off in Europe”. That is, you accept that democracies very much have the potential to pick options leaving them worse off for a prolonged period of time – you just kinda express a vague hope that wouldn’t happen, even though I don’t think anyone really has a theory for why the sentiment would go away, particularly when essentially the whole multiparty structure is devoted to sustaining opinions once they have entered “the political mainstream”.
To give another example: it’s not hard to find laments like “why can’t we just have the old Republicans (or insert the country’s corresponding mainstream right party here) back, who only wanted to argue about tax rates and the like, not all the (ethno)nationalist stuff?” Even setting aside how this exercise frequently involves whitewashing/rose-tinted view of those parties, it essentially presumes that because the speaker does not really understand this subject, it is therefore unknowable. Yet, economics is in fact very much knowable, and the GFC and its aftershocks (i.e. austerity programs in countries like the UK which had left-of-center governments toppled by the GFC and replaced with the right) had by and large hammered the final nail into right-wing/”center-right” economics just about everywhere (besides a few places whose own economies were screwed-up in different fashion, like Argentina.) Because multiparty democracy requires opposition parties, and because parties require raison d’etre, the right-wing opposition (including opposition within ruling governments, as with the British Tories) shifted further towards “politics of eternity” everywhere else. There’s no real logical reason why they would revert back, whether now, or in any remotely foreseeable future. In that case, the very structure of democracy essentially forces it to prop up its own ballast. (Granted, ballast also does keep the ships from keeling over – so we are back to the same point again.)
Right, a lot depends on what those in charge see as the priority of the state. For most of history, the states had been sufficiently autocratic that the priority had been rulers’ self-aggrandizement, with quite terrible outcomes.* This is still the case quite often – a financial columnist and all-around “stats guy” Simon Kuestenmacher** had recently remarked that we in Australia have a level of economic complexity not much greater than most petrostates, but our institutions prevent that from being concentrated at the absolute top. (Much like e.g. the Gulf States, but also places like Equatorial Guinea or Syrian Arab Republic under Bashar, who basically gave up on Baath founders’ ideology in favor of pure self-enrichment; around the time of its collapse, even soldiers were reduced to begging on the streets). A number of such states also choose to draw legitimacy from religion, virtually always embracing backward policies as the result (i.e. IRI had restricted women’s enrolment in engineering about a decade ago – which likely had a not-so-hidden cost in terms of additional radars and such they might have had operational by now.) The state atheist USSR was free from that, yet it eventually ended up shackling itself and the Warsaw Pact satellites to broken planned economy principles.
Thus, the PRC is one of the fairly few contemporary examples of a non-democratic state which genuinely appears to optimize itself to succeed according to objective, materialist metrics, as opposed to inherently unfalsifiable religious/romantic-nationalist precepts*** – the only other contemporary example I can think of right now is Singapore****. Again, an open question of how much longer this can continue – though it seems plausible that if their system is able to continue to prove itself over the subsequent decades, we would start to see other countries adopt their constitution as a template and the like. Of course, this is far from given – I’ll link to the best-argued version of the “bear case” I have seen to date. (Which is still visibly one-sided – i.e. it’s amusing how their discussion of Chinese “AI” sounds exactly like Zitron’s notorious criticism of American AI companies, yet they simultaneously seem to assume the recent AI bubble-driven growth rates in the US are sustainable for no clear reason.)
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/logan-wright-on-broken-china
One useful exercise is to recall the arguments for and against Brexit, recall that most of them applied to the scenario of the entire bloc collapsing – and then transpose them to Russia (or indeed, any other country of note.) That is, the key advantage of the EU is that it makes trade over this massive area function (almost) like one national market. However, any state is inherently a single market, which is broken with its collapse, as when the dust settles, all the now-self-governing pieces impose borders, customs checkpoints and likely other trade barriers. In all, an immediate and massive burden, which greatly discourages secession from any functioning market economy. (Chechnya thought they could manage it because they had oil – so one implication of the energy transition is that it makes separatism within Russia much less desirable.) It’s far from clear how much of grain Egypt purchases would even make it onto the terminals if the single trade area provided by the Russian state broke – and both itself, and the grain exporter regions would be apprehensive of that.
Can you really use this argument when NATO, as a bloc, isn’t designed to be “dominant” anywhere outside of the North Atlantic area – it’s literally in the name! Virtually all its members besides the US (and I guess the UK, with its rapidly-declining expeditionary capability) are not even interested, let alone capable, of contesting the Pacific or the Americas or the Indian Ocean area. The notion it would be faster for European NATO members to retool themselves to develop this capability (assuming they would even want to, which is itself an open question) than for China to expand its already-large navy even further and/or to build a US-sized transport plane fleet seems like it would require a lot more substantive evidence.
*I have already remarked on here that last year in China, a surprising hit at that time (last August, AFAIR) had been Tang-era drama The Lychee Road, which depicts how much state power even that dynasty had already been capable of marshalling over a millenium ago – and how it all ended up wasted for the brief benefit of a few dozen people. (The Emperor ordered to transport a fruit which normally spoils in 3-5 days over a distance closer to two weeks of normal travel time – and an fairly low-ranking official actually got it to work at a massive expense. Once he had the proof of concept, the demands of the Imperial court extracted so much from the countryside to fund the expanded courier network that it had soon erupted in open rebellion which ended the dynasty.) I was told that’s a very…romanticized depiction of the actual Tang collapse – but the fact that this is the narrative which is both officially encouraged in the PRC and resonates with its people (it topped the B.O that month) already indicates a lot.
**Who is also fairly China-friendly – at the very least, he’s regularly posted admiringly about their achievements and certainly does not appear to believe we in Australia ought to automatically side with the US or others in disputes or conflicts involving China. This is in line with some recent polls suggesting a slight majority of Australians now believe it’s better to work with China than to work to deter it. (Around two-thirds still support economic retaliation and military measures falling short of open armed conflict in the case of a Taiwan scenario – though a few years earlier, it was closer to an average of three quarters.)
***I.e. a lot of prewar Russian discourse (starting from 2000s at the least) focused on debating whether the country has “osoby put’” – i.e. “a unique path”. This notion was primarily popular amongst those broadly state-sympathetic, whereas the critics (including not just pro-Western democratic thinkers, but online-first technocratic authoritarians fairly equivalent to the American “nerd reich”) had dismissed it as a transparent cope, meant to distract from objective failures relative to developed Western countries with unfalsifiable feel-good stories like the supposedly unique levels of spirituality (“duhovnost’” – a concept sufficiently broad that it could encompass not just Orthodox Christianity but also state-aligned mosques and the like). By far the most prescient were those few who noted that effectively the same discourse, with the exact same terms, took place in the late-19th century Germany…
****Whose politics are quite different and closer to Western systems, since its people elect their President directly – just out of a very, very narrow list of candidates. Akin to Iran, in a sense – except that the latter’s criteria are much more religiously-weighted, and we have seen the outcome.
I will essentially say I believe authoritarianism and democracy are continnums and we don’t have absolute examples of either, but the comparison of executions for researching evolution to a trial for teaching it in public schools resulting in minor penalties shows that the USSR was much worse in the authoritarian direction.
And the PRC was at one point further away from the authoritarian end and even under Xi is not as bad as Mao or Stalin and I think that is directly contributing to them doing as well as they are in science and other fields.
And yes Mao had to fight a war so I should probably have looked for a famous historical mad king who got it by succession. Considered Nero or Cauligula but my understanding is that historians are skeptical they were as insane as portrayed so I went with a more definitively bad ruler well known in the modern era. Point is if Xi has a successor with his current powers they could be a madman who axes AI research because they can’t get it to follow the party line instead of pointing out propoganda or blatantly refusing to answer questions on sensitive topics. Or succession could turn into a bloody civil war like happened a lot in Rome. Meanwhile if the laws are obeyed Trump is out in 2029 and if not that’s a coup whatever his pet court says.
As for far-right in Europe, the electoral and judicial systems to my understanding are different in ways that mean they do not have a SCOTUS that will bless their PMs as “an unaccountable god-king”, as I have described Trump. They could of course change the laws. Xi’s successor could hold free and fair elections for all offices and enshrine freedom of speech in law. In either case I’d say the government has moved in the continnum. And I do not believe you could write laws in either system that would hold up to key institutions collectively deciding to change systems because they could just ignore the laws. Personally I think Trump should have been ruled ineligable for a second term under the 14th Amendment as I disagree with the ruling that it only empowers Congress to create laws rather than just letting it set procedures for how the decision is made.
That wasn’t the question, was it?
I don’t think this claim can account for e.g. India or Brazil being much less scientifically influential in spite of being much more democratic. (Brazil in particular punches well below its weight relative to population size or even economics, AFAIR.)
In fact, I found that 9 years ago, we have actually had “Does democracy cause innovation? An empirical test of the popper hypothesis” published in Elsevier’s Research Policy journal (Impact Factor of 8.9), which established the following:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323007240_Does_democracy_cause_innovation
Admittedly, that paper was primarily from Chinese researchers (though they have collaborated with the University of Tokyo), but either way, data is data. (And the journal itself appears affiliated with the University of Sussex). Furthermore, just this year, we had Most science is published from countries lacking in democracy and freedom of press (also published in the UK, via BioMed Central.) The title is self-explanatory, but the abstract adds “there was no correlation between the ratio of publications indexed in 2024 versus 2006 and the absolute or relative change in Democracy Index between 2006 and 2024 (r = 0.02 and r = 0.00, respectively).”*
To be fair, while 2021’s Democracy, Complexity, and Science: Exploring Structural Sources of National Scientific Performance, published via another British journal (under Oxford’s umbrella) was narrower in scope (“panel data on 124 countries between 2007–2017”), it did find a positive effect of democracy (as measured via V-Dem database)** on scientific performance, enhanced by economic complexity. Further, accounting for globalization and such caused it to find that “increases in scientific performance among advances democracies do not hinge on globalization or international collaboration. Rather, the reverse seems to be correct. Autocratic and less democratic countries are experiencing increases in their levels of scientific performance at least in part because of globalization and international collaboration with the advanced democracies of the world”.
By 2024, though, the exact same lead author (Caroline Wagner) had acknowledged in Science and the nation-state: What China’s experience reveals about the role of policy in science that the PRC’s experience shows the state-directed policy might be more important, and non/less-democratic states historical lagging in science might be more attributable to state disinterest.
The fact you have to reach this far back – and essentially deny there had been any generalized evolution of governance mechanisms over the past ~2000 years – is very telling. This is a bit like claiming that Athens was a democracy which had slavery, and so did the 18th century colonial European nations and the 19th century US, therefore it’s only a matter of time before the US or some other (Western) democracy reintroduces slavery.
To date, by far the most blatant example of developer-side “AI” tampering to date took place with the occasional “white genocide” truther Grok (aka MechaHitler). It wasn’t developed in the PRC.
DeepSeek did the latter from the moment it was launched (there were predictably memes attempting to get it to respond about Tiananmen and the like), and I presume so do the other models from the PRC. To date, that had approximately zero effect. (And if we are to treat “refusing to answer questions on sensitive topics” more broadly, then the “alignment” of Western “frontier models” to prevent their use to enable mass violence and the like had been (semi-successfully) attempted from pretty much the start.
OK, but all of this is tangential to the question at hand, which is whether Europe would be able or even willing/interested into making NATO what you want it to be.
*Though, it’s also worth noting the main author is John Ioannidis, notorious for his pandemic policies – which perhaps makes it remarkable his paper refers to the US as one of the countries with “problematic” freedom of the press.
@guy,
<i>More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents.[1][2][3][4] The president of the Soviet Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had been Lysenko’s mentor, but later denounced him, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed.[3]</i>
I’m certainly not going to deny that the repression and deformation of biological science under Stalin (and even continuing a bit after his death) was much worse, and more severe, than anything we have seen in the United States or England. But, I would say a few things in response, in support and agreement with @YARD’s excellent comment.
1) Like @YARD says, I think it’s better to view “Lysenkoism” in the Soviet Union as the kind of ideological excess that a new regime sometimes falls into in the process of establishing itself, rather than as the kind of thing that you can expect a long-established authoritarian state to slide into. States are usually more repressive when they’re <i>new</i>, and in the establishment phase, and tend to liberalize over time. More on this below.
2) I’d actually go further than @YARD, and underscore that what was new in the Soviet Union in the 1930s wasn’t actually just a political regime, it was a whole economic, ideological, and social order. The Communists and their supporters saw themselves as establishing an entirely new framework for how economic relations were to be conducted, how the means of production were to be owned and operated, how work was going to be managed, how the fruits of production were going to be distributed, etc., and they saw that as having consequences for the political, ideological, cultural etc. spheres of life as well. In a very real sense, as the first modern socialist state, they were figuring things out as they went along, since they had no previous examples to learn from. I’m obviously more sympathetic to Eastern Bloc societies than Bret is- though not without criticism- but even if you have no sympathy for communism or the communists, I think it’s only reasonable to expect that they would make big mistakes and have catastrophic failures at the beginning, and would learn from those mistakes over time. Which is, in fact, what we tend to see.
3) the fact that things like Lysenkoism were eventually ended suggests that, contrary to what some suggest, authoritarian states do have the capacity to self-correct.
4) Setting aside communism in particular, I think we can see the same thing happen with other “new” ideological movements as well, including ones I’m not particularly sympathetic to in principle. They tend to be more extreme at the beginning, and moderate and “mature” as they get a sense for the realities of governing a society and the tradeoffs that have to be made. I’m not super knowledgeable about the history of Islam or Islamic civilization, for example, but my general sense is that they gradually evolved to become, e.g., more tolerant of religious minorities as they were faced with the realities of ruling over large populations of Christians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, animists etc., who showed little interest in converting.
5) I think @YARD’s point is correct that while authoritarian social orders can have a lower “floor” than liberal ones, they also have a higher “ceiling”, if you have a party in charge that is genuinely interested in scientific truth and advancement. In a liberal society with competitive elections, you always have the risk of the opposition party deliberately trying to sabotage your governance so that they can win power in four years’ time. And that can include embracing ideas like global warming denial, creationism, skepticism towards vaccines and GMOs and the like, etc., especially when there’s a strong constituency for them.
6) The unstated assumption here is that the 20th c consensus in the US regarding science and technology was the normal state, and that what we’re seeng now is an aberration. How confident can we be of that though?
7) I think some societies can and do make the party-state model work fairly effectively. China is at risk of sliding into one-man dominance right now, but their southern neighbor Vietnam looks like they’re serious about the ideal of the party-state, and thus far has avoided it. The last six of the nine leaders they’ve had since independence seem to have been relatively low profile and to have avoided cults of personality.
@Hector
I think it is the case that an “enlightened despot” can do better for his reign but long-term you get an incompetent or at times literally insane successor as a much more likely outcome than an equally bad election in a democracy and they’re much less constrained and there isn’t a good way to remove them. Also there’s much more risk of a true succession crisis when for whatever reason there isn’t a clear agreed-upon successor. We did of course have January 6th but as far as I know that’s the only case of a dispute over who won coming to blood in the US and our last big war over not liking the winner ended in 1865.
As for sabotaging the government to win in four years that’s again a problem with the constitution being badly set up for parties, but it used to be much less severe and it wasn’t until 2010 that it became a major strategy. But I think parlimentary proportional representation with some form of independent judicary (but not SCOTUS’s lifetime appointments, not sure what is ideal) is better because it avoids making a loss for one party automatically a win for an opponent. And the flip side of MAHA being allowed to be promoted under Biden is that RFK jr hasn’t been able to send me to a labor camp yet.
Dictatorship has been tempting throughout history because a rational, intelligent dictator could do better than democracy but no one has cracked how to ensure you consistently have rational, intelligent dictators.
I will admit to not being familiar with how Vietnam is doing but I would expect a party state that managed to stay that way to do better than a dictatorship because it isn’t dependent on one totally unaccountable person’s sanity or competence. But I think it still has a risk of developing groupthink when the party gets to decide what can be discussed or studied.
I think the United States’ nearly 250 year run of success is in part due to democracy rather than in spite of it.
I’m going to pedantically argue that the idiom “begs the question” has evolved into two distinct usages: the original one, and the novel one.
The original one (which Bret calls the “correct” one here, surely raising the hackles of descriptivists everywhere) is the one that is effectively intransitive: Something begs the question, period; meaning that it assumes the conclusion. The novel one is effectively transitive: Something begs the question, “[some question]?”, meaning that it raises an obvious question.
There’s no conflict between these two and no reason to insist that the novel form not be used. If I say “[A] begs the question,” it is quite clear that I mean something distinct from “[A] begs the question, [B]?”.
See, that’s the wrong objection. The whole mess arises because “begging the question” is a bad translation and no one should use it. By the time you get from Aristotle to Roman Greek to Roman Latin to Church Latin to Shakespearean English to Internet Vernacular, “begging the question” is as close a match as “one does not simply walk into Mordor.”
If you want to invoke Aristotle’s prohibition on directly asking a debate opponent to concede the point of the debate, you can’t really use a pithy idiom at all; if you want to invoke the broader concept that tricking the opponent into conceding the point by phasing a question in a way that forces them to do so before answering, say something like “that assumes the point of the argument.”
The novel use is a whole other can of snakes, and I think it mostly comes from the extraordinary prevalence of fossil words in English idioms which teaches English speakers to think that words in idioms shouldn’t make obvious sense, but I can’t see how you’d do research studies about that which you could clearly connect to “begging the question.”
I cannot speak for others, but the second of those forms, B, is the one that makes intuitive sense to me.
The “correct” one seems to make no sense of the English-language words it uses.
That’s generally understood to be the reason the “incorrect” version exists, yeah. The “correct” version would make sense if you were a speaker of 16th-century academic English. If the idiom had come in just a few decades later it probably would be “petition the principle” which is a little more sensical but still not super helpful as a reference to the actual rhetorical malpractice it’s supposed to describe.
I agree. What the “question” is in the context of the original sense of the idiom is beyond me, and how it is “begged” less clear still.
On democracies being weaker, that’s actually pretty odd from Paradox for games other than CK and may be an artifact of wanting to let you crash-change the Democracies into other governments without 100% dooming them. Usually in their games having a democracy gives a range of bonuses that compensate for not always getting your way, such that if you wrangle the people into backing you you’re normally way stronger. As you noted with Imperator, in that case the Empire and enduring Dictatorship governments are straight upgrade paths, but it holds for equal-tiers versus autocracies as long as you can keep the “Senate” happy, and Athens in particular has an upgraded democratic government form that is IIRC halfway between the Republic/Monarchy and Empire tiers.
Stellaris’s actual “democracy” government form is in and of itself worse than the others in general in that you have a harder time installing the ruler you like than Oligarchy/Megacorp and Dictatorship and don’t have the predictable succession of Imperial or immortals of the Gestalts and last I recall (many updates since I paid attention) one of its big benefits is locked up in Leader Agendas where you have to do some arbitrary task to get Unity as opposed to various static bonuses, and you have to care more about keeping Factions happy, but Fanatic Egalitarian locks you out of other governments and gives you a noticeable bonus to making the resources you have unlimited demand for. Democratic also unlocks different Advanced Authorities with bonuses intended for a free society, although the authorities in general badly need a balance pass so whether this is great or sucks is kinda random depending on your ascension path.
IIRC in Stellars parliamentary democracies are still considered one of the most optimal and reliable ways of gaining Unity (the main currency used to get empire-wide bonuses besides technology, which can be somewhat less reliable).
I think with a specific civic and happy factions this is the case, but basically in my experience every empire I play unlocks its Ascension Path and fills it out fairly early without much difficulty prior to the point I’m ready to throw down with big fish who have vassals/allies anyway, and that’s the big breakpoint you want to hit in a hurry, and with a fixed number of Tradition slots I fill out 100% of them every successful game, usually before time to face off with Fallen Empires, and then my oligarchic/dictatorial/gestalt unity generation pays for the Unity Ambitions I actually want as well as any key standard edicts and the nominal fees on megastructures. Meanwhile you can always use more alloys to build more ships and fund the soldiers and stations to get the naval cap for them as well as megastructures (although for the latter I’m not sure some of the production ones were ever worth the time and cost and they got pretty badly power-crept so this isn’t an infinite alloy pit) and you have infinite repeatables to sink research into.
And without the specific civic, which carries the trade-off of not having any other civic in that slot, the government form doesn’t inherently give bonus unity outside of the fiddly agendas that at least before I stopped really trying to fufill them could sometimes be essentially or outright impossible. The fact that you’ll use quality living standards and the ethics you tend to have do in general raise your faction unity income but only if you keep them happy, and this tends to need more effort compared to authoritarian’s “I <3 Autocracy" where you straight-up get pretty much all your possibly faction happiness literally by being an autocracy and using the stratified living standard or slavery that are the reasons to be authoritarian in the first place.
That said, I'm a middling player who hangs out on Commadore with RP builds because I will not use a spreadsheet to plan my gameplay and Reddit can't make me, and inherently I tend to play strategy games by building up a strong economy before even thinking about military adventurism outside of playing a Genocidal where I want to snatch up a ton of planets quickly (or just space resources and purge income when I'm doing my voidborn Reyvatelia Fanatic Purifiers) or otherwise feeling time pressure like Endbringers. As of immediately pre-nomads, the last time I paid any attention to MP/GA No Scaling players, the "unity rush" using that specific civic to crash-unlock and fill an Ascension Path in a shockingly short timeframe to enable big early wars was one of the competitive builds and most if not all others also did an expedited Unity rush. But I feel like that's a degenerate result of the distorting impacts of high difficulty and facing humans in what's designed as a single-player game where managing AI behavior is meant to be a key part of it, plus the Stellaris team has a clear and good idea for how they want gameplay to be balanced but have never gotten all the numbers to line up the way they like, so some combos or origins like Knights Of The Toxic God (possibly reined in by recent nerfs but they said that before) let you hit the Ascension Path breakpoint without nonviable compromises on everything else decades earlier than is meant to be possible and in MP or on an extremely distorting difficulty level "don't have a strong military until 50 years into the game" is not a viable strategy no matter how buff it makes you by 100 years into the game, even though I pretty consistently run away with the game on the target standard difficulty levels until I find out if this RP build can beat the War In Heaven or the Crisis doing that.
So in the grand scheme of what the game is intentionally/unintentionally saying about politics I consider that being so incredibly strong to be like how in Total Warhammer 2 the optimal campaign strategy at high difficulties was apparently using armies consisting entirely of either heroes or ranged troops because the modifiers from difficulty were mostly about melee combat and the AI was incredibly exploitable, but obviously that wasn’t supposed to be the case . (and it’s not in multiplayer because your archers will be eaten by dogs and in
Domination, the mode meant for competitive play without literally pages of rules to basically say “don’t hide in a forest or run cavalry lords around all game to run out the clock” heroes simply don’t have the capture weight to win without bringing at least some infantry).
Doesn’t EU4 have a mechanic called “absolutism” that says “the more despotic your country’s form of government is, the better your country is at literally everything (but especially at war)”?
Not familiar with it because EU4 is too complicated for me, but looking at the wiki it seems to be relatively modest bonuses overall for capping it and anything centralized pushes it up even if not despotic.
And broadly EU is a very complex game where the costs associated with raising a number can easily not be worth it, plus the despotic governments are not simply a button you click to get more absolutism. By not being a Republic you get various Monarchy benefits but lose all this Republic stuff:
https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Republic
Can’t say how it all shakes out but my secondhand impression is that Republics are pretty strong overall in the parts of being a nation and even warfare that are not bayonet charges.
It does, but the primary determination of absolutism is how many rights you’ve granted to the estates, and some forms for of republics actually get bonuses to absolutism. I have no idea what absolutism is supposed represent, but the closest things to genuinely democratic republics in game can still get plenty of it.
I would assume more-or-less how well the king/president/prime minister/governing council/etc. in the capital can get people to obey their decisions as opposed to having to let mayors, nobles, governors, etc. do their own thing. That’s pretty clearly a good thing for the ruler if they are making smart decisions, and the difficulty of making this happen is represented by the various costs you pay for stuff that boosts the absolutism bar.
Paradox only manages to avoid infinite complexity by always abstracting multiple things into unified categories that don’t usually exist in rel-world historical analysis. Absolutism in the game combines generic centralization, improvements in communication, and the things that the Revolutionaries described as absolute when they criticized the French Monarchy. Probably some other stuff too, but despotism is both definitely a part of it and also not the whole of it.
It’s one of the weirdness with the names, but absoutism generally represents centralization in general, and general state power rather than absolutism *per se*. Part of what it is trying to represent is that states even in the 18th century where *incredibly weak* by modern standards, and the ability to just harness resources was a significant advantage.
This is trivial but calling this “the correct meaning” of “begging the question” is simply false. It is the *original* meaning, yes, and it is *a* correct meaning. But using it to mean “inviting the question” is also correct in that it’s always intelligible in context, and moreover doesn’t rely on an archaic definition of the word “beg” which essentially is never used outside of this phrase.
To put it another way, it would be wrong to say “the correct meaning of ‘awful’ is ‘inspiring awe,’” even though that was how the word was originally intended to be used, and indeed is still sometimes used today. Words and phrases can have multiple correct meanings.
It is not trivial to point out the hypocricy of prescriptivisizing an idiom in a post all about lamenting inadvert fascism-energy of HoI, even if, like Paradox, i trust Mr. Devereaux to not meant it that way.
*Norman Rockwell Free Speech Guy*
I don’t think linguistic prescriptivism is fascism.
Linguistic prescriptivism is a core tenet of fascism. Whether you’re asking a big linguistic question like “why don’t we call Yiddish a dialect of German?” or medium question like “why were people afraid they’d face violence for pronouncing ‘Barcelona’ without a lisp?” or a small question like “Barista?” these all originate with the application of fascist obsessions (for purity and unity) to language and linguistics.
This is perhaps best understood by focusing on the fact that fascism is foundationally about categorization, where these categories are universally arbitrary rhetorical tools to legitimize exclusionary power. If the Nazis had succeeded in purging all other races the next step would be purging the ‘wrong’ Aryans. They already had an ideal hair color picked. There’s no indication they’d ever stop.
We know this because the Nazis didn’t just kill minorities, they killed Germans who were ‘wrong’, disabled, gay, or intersex. Even if you’d proven the disability to be non genetic they didn’t care. The purpose of the machine was violence, and it would always find a victim.
Hence linguistic distinctions are absolutely perfect. Language is arbitrary so anything can be used to divide the population. Pronunciation is highly heritable, but also random enough that you can justify killing anyone if you try hard enough. It naturally diverges so you’d always have a way to justify oppressing people away from your imperial core, and there are even studies showing people have intense emotional reactions to hearing speech they don’t understand or think is different. It’s the perfect rhetorical difference.
Hence linguistic control by the state, while not inherently fascist, is extremely consistent with it. It’s like pointing at privatization and saying that it’s fascist; it’s not only seen there, but almost all fascism contains it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators
@Endy @Terry I encourage you both to take a brief look at the various languages with official regulators (there are far too many to list here). English is very much the exception for lacking any such body. How many of the countries listed would you say are fascist or fascist-adjacent?
As I see it, saying “linguistic control by the state, while not inherently fascist, is extremely consistent with it”, while true, is only slightly more useful than saying “having a military, while not inherehtly fascist, is extremely consistent with it”, then accusing anyone who claims to oppose fascism, but also wants to increase defence spending of hypocrisy.
(To be clear, I think there are many good reasons to oppose linguistic prescriptivism. I just don’t think it’s a terribly useful indicator of fascism.)
@Ben that’s not the question.
You’re missing the point in two main parts. First the language academies are not all *government regulators*, a key distinction. If a non government or international body produces rules for language which are not compelled by government then fascistic influences are minimized. If nothing else the centralization of that authority into law would be a valuable benchmark.
Second, the question is not “are those countries fascist” but “do their language authorities make them more fascist”. The question isn’t one of category but predictions. How do we prevent fascism from becoming more likely, what signs indicate backsliding, etc.
In this sense the establishment of national language authorities are *absolutely* making their countries more fascist. The French far right *love* their language authority. The French authority has been responsible for significant cultural erasure, and has played a part in the centralization of power under the state historically. More recently Eric Zemmour and Marie le pen have directly weaponized it politically, first trying to purge inclusive language so it’s literally illegal to be inclusive to lgbtq people in government documents, and then trying to define new terms like Francocide and Ensauvagement which legitimize their nativist idealogy.
The existence of a body which can officially define these terms in law is thus an example of an institutional vulnerability. Fascists can co opt the institution to further their goals and rhetoric.
The military policy comparison is useful here. While having defense spending isn’t solely fascist if a country changes it’s military from being defensive to offensively oriented, in creed or capability, that is a valid warning sign. This absolutely shows up in modern debates over Japan changing it’s export bans. If this was happening in a vacuum then *yes*, anyone supporting it while saying they opposed fascism would be a hypocrite.
The distinction is that there can be legitimate reasons for rearmament. It’s contextual. A country centralizing and legalizing it’s language authorities is universally a key warning sign because the public interest is so tenuous to begin with. There’s no legitimate role for government control of language, so any controlling mechanism is either superfluous or dangerous.
There’s legitimate government roles in standardizing weights and measures, maintaining official definitions of technical terms for purposes of coordinating scientific research or arbitrating contract disputes, and things like that, which would inherently imply some degree of control of language. Definitely something where overreach can get insidious, though, yeah.
@Terry “If a non government or international body produces rules for language which are not compelled by government then fascistic influences are minimized.”
Then do you at least agree that terrabalt was overstepping by accusing our host (a private individual with no coercive power to enforce his linguistic dictates) of hypocrisy here?
There are no strategy games which aren’t fundamentally authoritarian by this thesis.
From real-time tactics to RTS to turn-based strategy to GS to city builders – you are God in all of them. You have to be or the game’s not fun. Imagine playing Simcity and not being able to build or zone because of a NIMBY lawsuit or the federal government withheld grant money. Or losing the game 4 years in because of….ew….*voters.* Some RTT/RTS games not only allow you to issue move and attack orders but dictate the individual orientation of units — Company of Heroes and Dawn of War have armor differentials and fire arcs for vehicles and crew-served weapons, for instance. Not a thing that happened in real life.
For what it’s worth, roleplay (RP) is a big part of another Paradox GS game, Stellaris. There’s always just a few optimized meta builds and strategies to get you to victory with each patch or DLC, especially on higher difficulty settings. But I’d say (without quantitative evidence) the majority of gamers pursue RP runs with suboptimal empire builds. It significantly increases the replay value. There’s an origin called Broken Shackles where your civilization originates as a crashed ship full of freed slaves of pre-FTL species from around the galaxy, with all the attendant challenges of managing a polyglot, multicultural, multi-species polity, and one of the events that occurs later is you find your far more technologically advanced enslavers. The origin is hard, and you get kicked in the teeth from day one. But it’s fun as hell.
Other games might have levels of control that authoritarian governments can only dream of but I don’t know if you could say that Company of Heroes is authoritarian because you can determine the arc of fire of vehicles. This is not a political question and is not addressed by politics at all. These games do not address politics at all really.
Stellaris is a an example of a game that does address politics and does a better job than HOI4. In Stellaris democratic governments come with their own set of advantages (modifier based bonuses) and bonuses (and a meager attempt to represent the likes of the population). HOI4 is distinct difference because democracies are given none of their historical advantages at all, there is no attempt to show the downsides of authoritarian government, nor any attempt to show the upsides of democratic government. Stellaris is still flawed in similar ways to HOI4, but it’s doing a better job.
The point is that you can exert control over individuals with impunity across the entire genre. I don’t see how that’s not political. You are God. You have to be or the game’s not fun.
In grand strategy, the representation of all forms of government is buffs and nerfs. At no point does the player surrender decision making authority. Show me a game where an ordered unit says “no” in response to a command, or a government says “no” in response to a policy change, and I’ll show you an unsuccessful game.
Total War on the tactical map with routing or in some cases a Rampage mechanic. Also certain factions have uncontrollable subordinate armies like Chaos Warrior vassal armies or the Blood Hosts called up by Crone Hellebron
Victoria 3, where if you try to pass a law sometimes you just fail and can’t change policies. And most economic laws will, unless you switch this off, delegate control of some often big portion of your building construction to the AI to use for the benefit of private/noble investors. And all production buildings as well as nonmilitary physical infrastructure decide for themselves how many workers to hire based on supply, demand, and local wages, which you can only directly influence by clicking a button to subsidize them to maintain full employment no matter how unprofitable it is, usually only a good idea with railroads, sometimes critical military industries for ammunition or guns, and during the awkward transition to producing and using a new good where the producing and consuming buildings are both waiting for the other to be fully employed so there’s enough supply/demand.
You also have almost no control over armies in battle but that I’ll grant I think is a serious design mistake not so much because they act independently period but because your ability to influence them is so remote wars are basically multi-year “who has the better economy?” coinflips. Oh, and if the enemy isn’t targeting a wargoal on your nation or has secured the target provinces then if your war support drops low enough from casualties, debt, etc. you simply automatically surrender, even if you’re overall winning and supporting an ally with a lot on the line.
Crusader Kings 3 where if you try to remove a vassal to replace them with a better one odds are extremely high you get a mass revolt. Also your vassals will have a lot of troops of their own you simply cannot get access to and depending on realm laws may go to war with each other or on foreign wars you very well may not want.
Imperator Rome, where if a province is below a certain loyalty you simply cannot build in it at all, and if a governor is disloyal they’ll refuse to take orders or leave office without being arrested, exiled or killed, and if the commander of a unit is disloyal they’ll just ignore all orders and act as the commander thinks best even if they don’t revolt. And most characters take actions on their own for private matters like seeking medical treatment or getting married or occasional murder attempts.
Stellar Monarch, an indie game where the concept is that you are the Emperor, but not a ship designer, factory foreman, planetary administrator, etc. You have a limited number of political points at periodic big audiences to rearrange your cabinet and fire admirals or give them political officers. And you can make high-level changes to budget allocation and tell governors what to focus on and order military operations and set fleet layouts, but when you create a fleet and order it to do something the process of allocating shipyards to build and replace the ships is automated outside of being able to set a priority for which fleets to reinforce first, and combat happens automatically using whichever ships (often in multiple fleets) the admiral allocates and your only decision is whether to authorize WMDs. And for defending planets you assign an admiral to a cardinal direction and create a fleet configuration and getting ships built and assigned to garrison fleets is wholly out of your hands.
You may notice three of these are Paradox historical games, which is why Hearts Of Iron stands out for not working like that, but they’re not the only company that makes games with limited control over nominal subordinates.
Fair enough. You’ve convinced me. I stand corrected.
So, this is actually a bad example, since even HOI4 actually *does* have this. A unit whose organization is too low will refuse to attack or move.
Victoria has a an entire complicated process of enacting policies that can fail. Crusader kings will have your vassals refuse your demands all the time. (or demand something in return)
IIRC victoria 2 would actually refuse to let you declare wars if the governing party was pacifist, etc. etc.
Well, no, but actually yes. Not all RTS/TBS is authoritarian, inasmuch as you’re not often playing as the civilian leader of a country that ignores the humanity of their subjects, but there’s a reason that most country leaders coming with military leader background tend to become dictatorships, regardless of worldiness (eg. Il-sun Kim, Sukarno, Kai-Shek Chiang). Especialy when you include the genre’s tendency to Meme out things like logistic flow, information flow and loyalty.
In this case, Soekarno is very certainly not from military background. He struggles to contain one and it ends with him losing, replaced with the real military dictator. Maybe you’re thinking of Soeharto but it’s deep outside HoI era.
Of all the two names I swapped. I really need to rest more before commenting.
You’re still operating above the standard we use for world leaders at this point, so take heart.
Starcraft for certain trips over this issue, where the military leaders of the first game end up the political authorities of the second, without any kind of acknowledgement that these are different kinds of roles requiring different skills. Plus it often skates over what should be massive political issues because it looks at it from a game perspective – like all the times where when playing Terran, you can not only deploy building-busting artillery within cities but also launch nukes at their major intersections – because the city is “landscape” modeled around the playing field of the RTS. Or when the civilian government in the Protoss campaign of the first game is depicted as an obstacle that it’s best to just shove out of the way with a civil war. Never mind that lore-wise, the Khalai Protoss had not had internal military conflicts for centuries and in fact name their nation after the telepathic network that they came up with to *stop* civil wars from occurring again – the campaign story needed a reason for a Protoss vs. Protoss mirror match so all that goes out the window.
>Or when the civilian government in the Protoss campaign of the first game is depicted as an obstacle that it’s best to just shove out of the way with a civil war.
I disagree that the civil war is depicted as desirable in any way. Many story beats of SC hit differently than what Metzen may have intended; the Protoss in particular are consistently depicted as tragically incompetent and out of touch. They never take the zerg seriously enough and keep killing each other even while losing their homeworld. This isn’t just on the civil officials either; the invasion is triggered by a wiser-than-thou dark templar getting his mind read.
I don’t really don’t think that Metzen intended it this way, but a zoomed out picture of SC+BW story has multiple independent Terran factions effortlessly turning zerg feral, weaponizing zerg to attack various targets, as well as pacifying an overmind. Meanwhile the high and mighty Protoss lose their homeworld trying to kill a cerebrate.
I took the civil war as part of that depiction of the Protoss – a childish race that was given big toys, but had no idea how to use them, all pride and no substance, all their wisdom outdone by a handful of Terran medics pumping drugs into the juvenile overmind.
The Protoss in 1 are just straightforwardly arrogant and out of touch and it bites them in the ass despite being way stronger. They start off recognizing the Zerg are a problem and order Tassadar to just burn every world they touch to ash because the leadership (implictly including the Templar other than the fleet] doesn’t give a damn if they kill all the Terrans to scorch some zerglings.
Tassadar is obedient at first but can’t bring himself to burn planets that could be saved, so after the first use of the psi emitter he tries to intervene on the ground there, and then at Tarsonis he commits to trying to save the civilians and Mengsk has Kerrigan attack him mid-battle to ensure he fails. Between that and there being so many Zerg, his fleet is broken and he is disgraced but teams up with Zeratul to take out a cerebrate permanently and knock the Overmind offline, forcing Kerrigan to defeat q brood. This does give away the location of Aiur, and the Overmind really commits to the invasion when he’d mostly kept the bulk of the swarm in reserve during the Terran campaign because his target was always the Protoss.
Then the Protoss are still too arrogant to listen to Tassadar’s full explanation and squander their forces trying to kill Cerebrates without Dark Templar, then arrest Tassadar on treason charges rather than admit they ignored his explanation they needed Zeratul along. Finally, he, Fenix, Raynor, and Zeratul get through to the surviving leadership and get everyone together and kill the Overmind, but there’s so many Zerg they have to evacuate at the start of Brood War.
Then all of Brood War is Kerrigan’s Queen Bitch Of The Universe arc where she and Duran outplay absolutely everyone. She has the Dark Templar civilian leader under her control the whole game. The Protoss mirror match is actually the Khala civilian leader working this out and trying to thwart Kerrigan, but he’s killed by the complete suckers that are the Protoss protagonists. Duran then hoodwinks the UED into fighting the cerebrates forming the new Overmind and the Dominion and ordering the Psi Disruptor destroyed, but the second-in-command swipes it. Duran then tricks the UED into losing a bunch of troops against the Zerg, blames it on the “traitor” Stukov, and kills him and nearly destroys the Psi Disruptor for real, but is exposed too early and the UED manages to break through to the baby overmind and take control of it enough to command some zerg.
So the Queen of Blades suckers Raynor, the Dominion, and the Dark Templar into defeating the UED and killing the Overmind for her then betrays them all. Zeratul finally works out what’s up and tries to free his matriarch, but Kerrigan moves to get her back and Zeratul opts to free her in death. Then everyone Kerrigan screwed over comes back for revenge but she defeats them all.
I’m also confused by the statement the military leaders of the first game are the civilian leaders of the second, because they, uh, aren’t. Mengsk is the closest but he was essentially the civilian leader of the Sons Of Korhal to begin with; his dad lead a mostly peaceful seperatist movement and when Korhal was glassed Mengsk turned it into basically a terrorist movement and only sees real military success after Raynor defects as a frontier marshal who has at least some command experience and they snag Duke to be their strategist (and get the elite of the Confederacy military with him because most of them are brainwashed into obeying their officers). Kerrigan kills Duke and mocks Mengsk for not being a real military commander and overall I think we’re supposed to take that as correct. Raynor never intends to or does take a civilian leadership position; it’s a big point that the prison raid that unlocks Ghosts/Spectres also frees a ton of political dissidents with the skills to govern and Raynor basically says good for them, he’s just here for a personal vendetta and won’t be able to rebuild afterwards. Mengsk is replaced by his son Valarian, who is established in the novels setting up the second game and in-game as much as cutscenes allow to be a genius raised as a civilian leader whose only flaws are being naive and knowing just enough about military affairs to leave them to Warfield and Raynor.
Over on the Protoss side, Zeratul has become a DnD character going on personal military quests, not ruling. Artanis does seem to be in charge of the Khala Protoss but only as general of an army without a state; it seems like he has nothing to do with civilian affairs on the Dark Templar homeworld from what little we see. He first reappears leading a bid to retake Aiur and after Amon takes over he narrowly escapes, covers the evacuation of Dark Templar civilians, and runs around in a big military ship akin to Homeworld’s mothership. We do see a civilian guy in the Protoss main cast but he’s an engineering director no one would ask to be president, and during the campaign there aren’t any civilian affairs to speak of. Selendis is Amon’s mouthpiece in Legacy but her prior and subsequent role seems to be purely a fleet commander, and while acting as prophet a god is micromanaging such society as they have and he’s older than the universe so he probably has a broad range of skills. I will grant the Tal-darim seem to have civilian leadership determined by military ability but clearly they’re meant to be a deeply disfunctional society.
The Zerg are a hive mind with no meaningful civilian/military distinction in leadership but insofar as there is one Kerrigan delegates to purpose-built organisms for R&D and presumably her broodmothers whose job is to tend to the primary hive clusters rather than command in the field have suitable skills imprinted.
@Anon While I agree that the story of the Protoss is intended to be a tragedy of hubris, I would not describe their cardinal sin as “childishness”, or even decadence. It’s rigidity – their society is so conservative and so ossified that it’s incapable of unbending enough to adjust to a new threat.
But the plot hole I pointed out still remains, which is that the Khala was designed to stop Protoss vs. Protoss wars, and yet one happens anyway.
@guy To clarify, I’m mainly talking about Mengsk and Artanis as people who ended up as civilian leaders despite being military people. And I think you’re kind of understating the enormousness of their stations at the start of SCII.
Arcturus Mengsk has so successfully transformed civilian society that nobody seems to remember that four years ago, the polity was called “Confederacy” instead of “Dominion of Man” and there’s no loyalist hold-outs wanting to bring the old order back. He’s so secure in his newly created position of Emperor that his death does not result in any uprisings – his son Valerian takes over smoothly. This is an unbelievable feat for a man, who whenever he appears in the story is shown as callous and self-centered, who is willing to throw as many lives away as he likes to advance his personal agenda – not the kind of person that should be able to command that kind of society-wide loyalty after four years.
And Artanis being allowed to stay in command after the dust of the Brood War settles is also strange, and that he gets promoted to Hierarch, which does appear to be an absolute leader position, even more so. Artanis’s military record is at best middling – he wins battles but keeps flubbing the strategic war goals – and his political acumen is non-existent. After starting a pointless civil war, he gets played like a fiddle by Kerrigan during the Brood War. Even if nothing is left of the Khalai civilian governance after the fall of Aiur, the Nerazim (Dark Templar) leadership should have been like “Can we get someone else to lead?”
As for evidence that Artanis as Hierarch is in an absolute ruler position who no only commands a fleet but also civil society, note that Vorazun, matriarch of the Nerazim, is subordinate to him with basically no discussion and that Artanis gets to declare Khalai castes to be no longer a thing without consultation with anyone else.
Well, with Mengsk as I said he was always a civilian leader. Like Mon Mothma in Star Wars but evil. And this does indeed require different skills, and on the military side Mengsk mainly possessed delegation to Raynor and Duke (and the player character of SC1, who was dropped from continuity since they were only a framing device). Before that he was running a simple terrorist organization that wasn’t accomplishing much from what I recall. The big score was freeing Kerrigan and then he had an extremely well-trained special forces operator and I think strongest human telepath at that point, a massive asset to a terrorist organization (IIRC Nova had more raw power but with her psi inhibitors could use less). It’s to the point that after killing Duke Kerrigan mocks Mengsk for not being a threat to her without him while taking Raynor’s threat of vengence with one battlecruiser to his name more seriously. And in Omega she’s puzzled he has been able to bring a meaningful force and he says “You’d be surprised how many special interest groups want you dead” implying he used his political skills to rally a force of everyone Kerrigan has fucked over and I would guess put Warfield in charge of the actual fight.
Then in SC2 he again has delegated the military side to Warfield until Kerrigan eliminates him and I would not call Mengsk’s military decision-making after that great. And in terms of the message about how society should be run, Valerian is presented as the ideal civilian ruler and his entire contribution to military affairs is getting Warfield to team up with Raynor for the Char mission and then attending meetings where he’s very charismatic but only uses this to get Raynor and Warfield to cooperate then backs their decisions. Then in the Nova minicampaign remnants of the old regime are trying to regain power by making him look too weak to defend his people, which seems like it might have worked if Nova hadn’t intervened.
And Artanis is in charge overall, yes, for his heroic victories and being totally suckered by Kerrigan is overlooked because pretty much everyone else was too, except the civilian Judicators who saw through it but failed to adequately communicate this and are dead now. But this doesn’t seem to involve doing much day to day; the Khala Protoss are effectively crashing on the Dark Templar’s couch and while he does outrank the Dark Templar leader their onscreen interaction has her IIRC handling organizing the civilian side of the evacuation and I have the feeling if Protoss have something you can meaningfully describe as taxes she handles those with Artanis at most saying he needs more vespene gas. Kinda the inverse of how the President is Commander In Chief of the military.
As for abolishing the caste system, friction between the castes contributed to the disaster in SC1 and Artanis had a front-row seat to that. And when he does it civilian society basically has ceased to exist and his civilian-ish subordinates are mostly Dark Templar who thought the caste system sucked in the first place and the de facto lowest caste who probably didn’t like being bossed around by Judicators and Templar. And when civilian society is restored the Khala is gone and society is going to be very different. And probably there was some trouble as a result but the last Protoss cutscene is the Khala Protoss literally cutting themselves off from the Khala and then we jump cut to a while later when Kerrigan basically says “Let’s invade Hell to make me a god who will kill the Devil” and all we know about how things shook out is that Artanis can send a major force along and no one we recognize has been purged or fired.
For his record I’m pretty sure he is, even in Brood War but definitely in SC2’s removal of the framing devices, the Executor from the SC1 campaign so he has commanding the forces supporting Tassadar in the attack on the Overmind on his record and I think his battlefield success rate in Brood War isn’t bad apart from losing in the last Zerg mission which is explicitly because Kerrigan is an enormous badass and genius tactician.
So overall I’d say Starcraft does not stumble here at all and seeming like it does is an illusion created by it being an RTS in which civilian stuff is mostly offscreen. As for the political implications of artillery and tactical nuke use in civilian areas, in a state of total war with no laws of war any major participant recognizes people do that. However, in the manual and side content excessive brutality is why the Sons of Korhal aren’t a peaceful political movement anymore at game start and they continue to rally support. And then Raynor only manages to spark a big revolution by revealing Mengsk used the psi emitters to overrun Tarsonis with Zerg. Raynor does use the full normal range of SC2 units in civilian areas, of course, but I think it reasonable to assume he has issued informal rules of engagement about artillery strikes and such given his character. And on the questline where he helps the civilians who turn out to be infested if he does choose to kill them he asks Selendis to pull out to let him save as many of the uninfected as he can rather than letting her burn the whole colony. And the doctor reacts with outrage and then a desperate bid to create a cure that gets her infested but lucid enough to condemn Raynor for the massacre.
“and there’s no loyalist hold-outs wanting to bring the old order back.”
IIRC; there are a few mentions (as well as some UED leftovers) I want to say some of the mercenaries Raynor can hire, and a few other bits like that.
I also *think* The Terran magistrate is supposed to be Horner the same way the Protoss Executor is supposed to be Artanis, but I’m less certain about that.
No, essentially when Blizzard opted to not reuse the framing device of the player characters they just dropped them from continuity and Raynor did all the stuff the Magistrate did Raynor was present for and a nameless Magistrate did the stuff that happened without Raynor and then dropped out of the story. Horner has a backstory different from that.
Likewise the Cerebrate from the zerg campaign is totally dropped as dying offscreen and Kerrigan is treated as having had total control of the purple brood as soon as she woke up and the cerebrate’s contribution is not mentioned.
In Brood War I felt like Artanis was supposed to be the Executor from the original, and the new Executor who is the player also got memory holed. I choose to believe Selendis was the second Executor but it’s never implied beyond that she’s Artanis’s second in command and the one who goes out to do stuff.
As for Confederacy holdouts, canonically everyone who wasn’t from Tarsonis didn’t like the Confederacy in the first place on account of all the oppression. So with the Zerg eating everyone on Tarsonis everyone just cheered when Mengsk announced the Dominion. With the Neural Resocialization used on the troops, when an officer defected most soldiers obediantly followed along, so with no political base, Duke having already brought over Alpha Squadron, and everyone of high rank who hadn’t defected dead, basically everyone opted to paint Dominion colors on their armor. There’s various small holdout groups arguably including Raynor’s Raiders but they have no real political ambitions.
And there’s a couple non-Confederacy human factions older than the Dominion as explanations for why you can play purple terrans in the manual and a mining combine is involved in the Brood War and Starcraft Wings Of Liberty missions where the goal is to get a huge mineral stockpile and IIRC Legacy Of The Swarm starts out with the protagonists hiding with the purple terrans.
And the manual similarly included backstories for the different colors of the other races but they’re under the same government, but orange and purple Zerg are the main striking force and red is the Overmind’s Pratorian Guard minus the treachery and when you get special “hero” Zerg other than Kerrigan they’re usually red. And the story uses the colors consistently.
@guy Your argument is not quite coming together. If we trust Brood War Kerrigan’s judgement on relative danger (and I’ll fully agree that we’re meant to trust her on this) that Raynor is more dangerous than Mengsk, how does that square with the situation four years later, with Mengsk being the one sitting in a palace with thousands of troops at his command and Raynor sitting in a bar with basically still only a single battlecruiser to his name? The Dominion that Mengsk builds up is so strong militarily that not only Raynor’s Raiders but even Kerrigan in Heart of the Swarm uses guerilla tactics against him to avoid a head-on confrontation.
And I’m not convinced on Warfield being as decisive an asset as you make him out. Sure, we get told Warfield is a good general, but what we get shown is the opposite. He blows the invasion of Char by holding the final planning session within range of the orbital defenses of the Swarm, losing a lot of his military force when that inevitably blows up in his face and needs to be personally bailed out by the decidedly weaker Raiders. He then manages to hold Char, but only because his opposition went to the Cadorna school of operational planning – the moment Kerrigan takes over Warfield gets defeated despite the final battle being a straightforward fortress assault where Kerrigan doesn’t really have much space for fancy stratagems.
Well, what Kerrigan means is that militarily Mengsk is incompetent. My argument is that Star Craft in fact views civilian and military leadership as separate skillsets and Mengsk is highly qualified on the civilian side and has Raynor, Kerrigan, Duke, and Warfield do the military side. And he feeds all meaningful rivals to the Zerg and still can’t keep a tight grip on outlying planets. As for rebuilding Korhal, SCVs construction speed in game is mostly canonical to the lore (hours not minutes though) so after he becomes Emperor by default it isn’t a big feat to build a new capital in short order.
And yes, Warfield’s record is not great, really, but he is more competent than Mengsk. And for the planning session that was because he needed orbital scans as the Zerg prepared to repel the invasion to pick landing sites. And the invasion not going smoothly was just because Char is heavily fortified and swarming with Zerg and Kerrigan is consistently portrayed as the best general of the cast. And I think even Raynor only pulled off the win not only because he had a basically magic artifact that I sure as hell couldn’t win the final mission without spamming but I think Kerrigan took a dive subconciously because deep down she still loved Raynor and wants to be with him, as indicated in-mission when her uninfested avatar is displayed and says “Keep fighting, Jim”.
And on the battlefield Kerrigan is concerned about, it’s Raynor and Warfield with Valerian as moral support who storm the primary Hive Cluster and deinfest her. If she’d killed Raynor as well as Fenix on Korhal she’d have remained the Queen Of Blades until the Golden Armada attacked Char or Amon ate her. And after she gets deinfested then reassumes control she rapidly makes a comeback and in her battles with Mengsk as the enemy commader she runs the table except when he uses his understanding of psychology to manipulate her, even with him having heavily invested in anti-Zerg tech and Raynor having talked her into minimizing civilian casualties and installing Valerian.
By the way, one of the funnier moments in BW for me is the arrival of the UED. Day one, they arrive and proudly declare war on the entire sector. Couple missions later, they’re taming an overmind, presumably in the same week they first encountered a zergling.
If you go by what *actually happens* in the campaign, the race that turned the Protoss into space refugees isn’t a threat to Terrans, it’s a toy. The list of Terran factions without zerg weaponization programs is..short? zero?
Starcraft 1 was in the days when a lot of the story was in the manual.
Basically the whole colonization of the sector was by a mix of criminals and political prisoners who’d been sent to go to start a mining colony close to Earth but they were in cryosleep and the ship AIs malfunctioned and just flew right past the destination and went on for thirty more years before running out of fuel and making emergency landings. The fascistic UED found out what happened at some point and was discreetly monitoring the sector, and when they saw the Zerg and realized they might head for Earth the UED freaked out and sent a massive battlefleet to intercept and stop them. So it’s their first meeting with the Zerg in person but their finest scientists have been planning this out ever since the first zergling was spotted on Mar Sara, I think.
Incidentally the reason they have the same unit lineup, with only medics and Valkryies as additions and upgraded goliaths, is because they swiped the plans through snooping on data transfers and wanted to be able to effectively reinforce and repair in the field.
You’re kind of overstating the amount of control the Terrans have over the Zerg – the whole UED plot would have been dead in the water if the Overmind had been alive or Duran had not decided to help them out as necessary. And Mengsk’s “control” over the Zerg with the Psi Emitter was based on a misunderstanding – the Zerg Overmind happened to be looking for a powerful psionic to create the Queen of Blades and Mengsk helpfully commanded Kerrigan to keep announcing her position to the entire sector. It’s not spelled out, but I feel pretty sure that after Tarsonis, the Psi Emitter stopped “working” because the Zerg had what they needed.
Whenever the Zerg are unified and actually focused on them as an opponent, the Terrans get handed their asses as badly as the Protoss. See not only how easily Tarsonis was overwhelmed, but also how Mengsk is forced to do the same thing he criticized the Confederacy for when the Swarm returns at the start of SCII: Abandoning all outlying worlds to their fates to concentrate the military defense on the core worlds to stand a chance.
Which is not to say your basic argument is invalid – that in general, the Terrans are capable of trying out novel approaches that often succeed, while the Protoss when faced with the same problem usually flail and get in their own way, I do agree with. I just think the difference in performance is not as marked as you make it out.
That is itself a toxic meme understanding of politics, although one you’re not alone in indulging in – it’s one you share with most political leadership and a lot of political pundits. Because it imagines that the “win” state of a democracy is one political party, or worse, one political leader, remaining in power as long as possible, using whatever strategy possible to win the votes to do so. For my money, that to me is actually a dangerous aberration of the process, in which the game of power-gaining is over-emphasized over the actual important politics of affecting the country with laws and regulations, and I want my political leaders to do the second.
I think you misunderstand. What I’m saying is that a strategy game that ends prematurely because you made unpopular decisions that led to you getting kicked out of office is not a fun game. The most optimal laws are not the most popular ones (e.g. taxation of carbon emissions), and if a game represents voters with any degree of accuracy, they will be fractious, shortsighted, and easily manipulated.
There actually are many games where you can lose by getting kicked out of office for unpopular decisions. Frostpunk, for instance, where stretching out rations with sawdust can be the difference between starvation or success but people hate eating sawdust. And one of the main plot beats is people who have lost all hope the Generator will work out wanting to return to London because surely it won’t actually fall (it 100% is under twenty feet of ice already) and you have to persuade and/or coerce them into staying. And getting thrown out in a mutiny is the main way to lose when you can win with like five people left as long as they listen to you.
Then in the sequel The Captain has died and as The Steward you have less authority and less trust and you’re almost out of coal and need to refit the generator for oil, which involves getting a bunch of laws through the council votes riven by bitterly opposed factions, and in the main story after you make it through a big storm people want to either upgrade the generator further to have a bubble of actual warmth or accept Earth is a ball of ice and spread out to establish new settlements and adapt to the cold rather than try to make a single city where it’s always 72 degrees F for all of mankind to live in. This boils over when you decide to go to the failed city of Winterhome, because it’s full of both toxic gasses and buried steam cores the generator faction need for their plan and getting all the steam cores will involve sending potentially thousands of people to die choking on fumes and end up filling the site with so much toxic gas it has to be abandoned, while sealing off the gas will bury most of the cores for good. It comes to riots and murders and you have to head off civil war potentially by restoring Captains Authority either by a vote in response to teetering on the edge of open warfare or via a straight-up coup.
But The City Must Survive.
Point is, you don’t need to be an unchallenged dictator for a fun game. But games need to be released at some point or the investors get mad so no game can do everything. And usually either you have only external politics or only internal politics being meaningful; Paradox stands out for having both and in the other historicals they’re more evenly balanced.
Incidentally, in Sim City there are penalties for laws meant to control pollution although at least the ones I played didn’t have carbon taxes since it’d be politically and probably legally impossible for an American city to impose them. There’s no election system but residents and businesses vote with their feet and with property values and thus taxes. Laws requiring businesses to control emissions will hurt industrial demand, laws requiring residents to put in effort to recycle and conserve power hurt residential demand. But Sim City is an urban planning game, not an elections game so you only get voted out of office if you go bankrupt beyond your ability to get a rescue loan on any terms.
Remarkable how this sounds really impressive as a narrative arc – until you think about it for like a minute and realize that they (“you”) ought to just blow up a hole somewhere where it would vent the gas to the outside. After all, if everything is so cold it’s already unlivable, what are you even afraid of contaminating? In the meantime, dilution is dilution.
Of course, all these “permanent geoengineering” stories are dumb, dumb, dumb in the first place. That’s not how the physics of this works at all; it’s very hard to keep any reflective particles suspended, so far from overshooting so hard stuff freezes, the problem we face is the exact opposite: once initiated, it would have to be maintained practically indefinitely (technically, until the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere equilibrates with the temperature you have been trying to maintain via geoengineering – but that still takes centuries under any halfway realistic proposals), and any interruption longer than a few months risks initiating “termination shock” which would essentially be the most sudden shift in Earth’s climate since the Chicxulub impact.
Really, a story set in the aftermath of termination shock has incredible potential and the narrative exploration involved could actually inform the future – unfortunately, so many keep doing “frozen world” stuff. (Granted, perhaps my view is distorted from spending too much time looking at Steam queue/Metacritic and spotting primarily “survival” releases with this theme, which even most gamers, never mind most people in general, are not going to be aware of.)
Thinking further on this had reminded me of Reigns – which surprisingly appears to have gone unmentioned in this thread to date!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2HnvpXqII4
(For anyone unfamiliar; a typical run there is failed when any one of the four symbols at the top – the cross for the church’s attitude/general piety, a stick man for the popular opinion, a sword for the military and an anachronistic dollar sign for your treasury – reaches either end as the result of “Tinder-interface” binary decisions you make. That is, you obviously fail if the kingdom goes bankrupt, if its forces get too weak to stop from being conquered, if the people overthrow you or if you get branded a heretic. However, if any of the first three get too comfortable (their symbol is filled) they decide they do not need you anymore – the Church establishes a theocracy, your generals coup you and the people establish a republic (perhaps the most pleasant game over, AFAIR, as they still love you enough to let you vacate the throne alive and free). The game over for being too rich is kinda contrived (you choke to death during an epic feast), but its presence is ultimately understandable.)
Problem is that the Generator is actually geothermal from what I can tell based on Last Autumn. So with the structural damage to the surface from Winterhome’s generator exploding there’s a constant flow of toxic gases into the crater. And if you blew a big hole in the crater to let them out you’d let the wind in and that would spike your heating requirements. So the only viable option to settle there is to seal off the toxic gas venting from The Source and with the engineering capacity New London can deploy to Winterhome no one can think of a way to do that and still get all the steam cores. And the Progress faction doesn’t actually want to settle Winterhome in the first place, they want to be able to walk around New London outdoors in t-shirts, while the Adaption faction thinks that’s impossible and trying is stupid. So not too much thought is put into this by any participant because there simply isn’t a way to both upgrade the generator and not upgrade the generator.
As for the overall geoengineering, Frostpunk leaves the cause of the Great Frost deliberately ambiguous as no one knows for sure what happened and if maybe the Astrophage from Project Hail Mary has showed up or something. There is a theory that it was geoengineering but that one was from a doomsday weapon intended to cause at least a milder version of the Great Frost over most of the world if it was in-universe real at all.
The only thing we can say for sure is that world governments realized it was happening barely in time to do the Generator project, Tesla City, and France was trying to do Snowpiercer but you steal a bunch of parts in The Last Autumn so presumably they didn’t finish in time. During The Last Autumn you are racing to complete a New Liverpool generator during the titular Last Autumn and it’s set up so as to give you a decision when the generator is online but you haven’t added all the optional upgrades to call it done and get out just before the ocean freezes for good, and if you don’t an icebreaker comes to pick you up at the final deadline. And there were dozens of sites but as the frost closes in you’re told most of them have been abandoned because all resources are being diverted to finishing the handful in the main game (and the ones in Survival Mode that you don’t have to build at the start but those are What Ifs?).
And you have the same toxic gases problem when you dig the pit to The Source in The Last Autumn, and its big conflict is that there’s a (fatal if you haven’t taken adequate measures to prepare) accident in the shaft early on when some of the gases explode and the workforce goes on strike demanding higher safety standards. And you know but they don’t that the frost is closing in and you’re censoring letters from home about how everything is going to hell as crops fail and storms start up (for reasons never specified the Great Frost is actually mildest in the north) so there absolutely isn’t time to spend a year doing it the way OSHA would tell you to. So you have to get the workers back in the shaft to get it finished one way or another whether by making concessions or driving prisoners in at gunpoint. I went with the Engineer route where I persuaded the union the eggheads knew what they were about and got them to go back with as much safety equipment as I could make and following newly-devised procedures, and I made up the time by implementing two shifts so there was a full crew working the generator day and night except when the gas was bad enough that even with the ventilation system I called a halt. The other route is to side with the workers and put union bosses in charge and comply with demands for procedural changes, and potentially go full communist revolution and execute some engineers as an example and replace them with smart workers (which lets you use basic workers in any job but for engineer jobs they’re less efficient by quite a bit since they didn’t go to a top engineering school) and at the extreme end have workers going into the pit presumably singing revolutionary anthems about how the proletariat will rule the new world as corpses are going the other direction.
Incidentally, I have played Reigns and its GoT licensed version some but it’s just not sophisticated enough to have come to mind.
One that does is KoDP/Six Ages, with Six Ages having frostpunk like vibes at times. It’s in the Runequest setting, and in Six Ages the wind god Orlanth has recently used The Thing Called Death to kill Yelm, who was literally the Sun, which turns out to be as bad an idea as it sounds. You start out as Riders, who fled the Golden City just ahead of an army of frost monsters under the Cold Sun with glaciers following behind, and worship Emergency Backup Sun Elmal as their chief god. Your people expect you to follow customs and both their morale and clan magic get worse when you don’t, although you have some flexibility because their hero and new god Hyalor gave them their founding law in the form of blank golden tablets to symbolize that it’s important to adapt instead of following written law. In the first game you have to marry a hero named Beren to a priestess of Orlanth’s wife (who was Yelm’s concubine hence the killing) which is naturally politically difficult but Hyalor says it’s fine if you ask him and the priestess mentions she had her own adventures getting her clan to agree even with the epic wedding gifts you come up with. Also Hyalor slept with a plant goddess and has a divine daughter and there’s a lot of contention over whether she’s really his daughter you have to sort out but she can officiate the wedding for extra cred.
Then the second game, Lights Going Out, is about the post-marriage combined clan when the ontological evil of Chaos let in by Yelm’s death is really starting to dominate. Fun bit here is that the clan has hereditary kings of a larger tribe with other clans, but after the one before the game starts died and the regalia was lost the other clans have basically said they’re not gonna listen to the king unless he gets the regalia back, and your own clan is divided on whether to try to restore the king’s authority or accept that it’s gone and have him stick to doing the rituals to keep some magic going. You get the option to try to raise spirits and reunite the tribe by finding the regalia, but you cannot succeed; the third treasure isn’t in the game because on a fundamental level Chaos has destroyed people being able to work together on the scale of a tribe and it can’t come back until after the final choice of the game. And partway through you stop being able to do two clan-wide ventures in one year because Chaos has destroyed cooperation. But if you don’t try to find the regalia the royalists in your clan get upset, and if you’ve not been working to tamp down on expectations for the kings this is a big issue.
Also a big issue is that you’re horse-and-cattle pastoralists relying on divine blessings and Chaos eats your horse and cow goddesses during the game. Your people (and the event text!) do not take this well. Also your god of language can get eaten and suddenly everyone is either speaking gibberish or revealing horrible truths of thoughts of patricide until a year or so later another god is able to take over.
Oh yeah, before you get any ideas about building on-site production facilities near Winterhome to get more equipment than can be hauled fully assembled over what a steampunk civ can set up across bad terrain coated in snow and ice and no warmer than -20C, bear in mind there are Whiteouts, roided out super-blizzards that come through every so often and until the one in the main story New London has not been able to put any major structures outside of its own crater that can be kept in working order through a Whiteout. Winterhome is the only location identified that can support more than a smallish extraction base for oil or similar in range of New London that’s not exposed to a Whiteout.
And because of The Source issue even if you find a suitably sheltered location you can’t build a Generator unless it has its own Source even disregarding that in the main game the technology to manufacture some components is currently entirely lost (you can get an old factory operational in Utopia mode) so it’s just outright impossible to heat anywhere to the same standard as New London. So the Progress faction basically just wants everyone to live in New London forever except for resource-gathering outposts and figure either the climate will recover at some point or more likely they’ll invent what they don’t know would probably be nuclear reactors at some point and create an eternal bubble of warmth.
And the Adaption faction says “That is stupid. You are stupid. We have to invent buildings and ways of feeding ourselves that are less difficult to heat and we need to Survival Of The Fittest our way to not freezing to death outdoors at -60C.” The Icebloods are the most drastic Adaption faction and combine this with drugs and implanted blood heaters to make that possible without wearing shirts, which I think is about as plausible as the steam-powered AI-controlled city Progress can make.
Mechanically at least back when I played much (they redid heating mechanics and I couldn’t learn the new system) the Adaption guys were clearly the objectively correct faction to back if you wanted to have a populous city and colonies. Basically Progress has a ton of labor efficiency boosts and their Generator burns oil more efficiently and can be run really hot to the point you can be outdoors in a T-shirt for more efficient everything, but it turns out even Adaption has more people than they know what to do with and it’s way more important to be heat-efficient. And yes, you can run the Progress generator on normal mode for better efficiency from oil and use Adaption buildings and laws but the real good capstones make you pick a side permanently. And the Progress generator only runs on oil while Adaption can also use coal and secondary geothermal.
It’s also a deeply elitist one, because it assumes that voters cannot know any better and they are making a mistake by not keeping your party or leader in power for all eternity. This problem tends to come from an unstated desire of not wanting to deal with the human element of the power equation.
The funny thing is, now that CK3 has the Roads to Power DLC, you actually have a simulator in which you can balance out the actions of a state with the intricacies of interpersonal relationships. I think a potential HOIV would benefit from importing that system to deepen its politics.
“yet in 1942 and 1943, the United Kingdom – not the British Empire, just the United Kingdom – was outproducing the USSR in total GDP despite having a tiny fraction of the landmass and around a third of the population”
I think the reality is a bit more complicated than that. The UK wasn’t completely separate from the rest British Empire. Instead, it relied heavily on them to loan them money on favorable terms, which allowed it to concentrate its economy fully on arms production. Still very impressive of course, but I just feel like people sometimes ignore how much the *rest* of the British Empire contributed, when they only look at maps of Europe and see Britain standing alone as this small isolated island, when in reality it was the head of a vast empire that controlled something like 1/4 of the entire *world’s* area and population. India, in particular, contributed heavily to the war effort.
Bret is not counting the colonial empire and lend-lease from USA, Britain contribution to the war compared to the soviets was pathetic for a nation of that size, but really it is not their fault… the country was almost bankrupt and depended almost entirely of American help even compared to the soviets
That part certainly seems like Bret expending his goodwill to push an agenda.
““yet in 1942 and 1943, the United Kingdom – not the British Empire, just the United Kingdom – was outproducing the USSR in total GDP despite having a tiny fraction of the landmass and around a third of the population””
It’s also completely ignoring the fact that the UK had a bit of a head start. At the start of the 20th century, the UK already had decades of industrialization behind it, while what will later become the USSR was still essentially a medieval backwater.
It’s true that our host somehow managing to “forget” his own writing on the extent to which the Industrial Revolution began in the UK (and how that event could well have been contingent on irreplicable accidents of geography*) is…weird, to put it politely. However, you are overcorrecting, way, way too far!
That is, according to e.g. Paul Bairoch’s 1982 work in The Journal of European Economic History, “International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980”, in 1913 the Russian Empire had the same per capita industrialization levels as the contemporary Japan.
https://jeeh.it/en/archive/2-1982/international-industrialization-levels-from-1750-to-1980/
As in, his approach, in Table 4 of the PDF, takes the UK in 1900 as the baseline (100), and measures both the UK itself and other notable countries across this entire period relative to that. Thus, both the Russian Empire and Japan of 1913 had a fifth of 1900 UK’s levels (20); the UK of 1913 now had 15% more industralization (115 – already 2nd to the US, which is at 126 that year). Perhaps another way to look at this subject is that such per capita industrialization level (20% of 1900’s UK) is identical to that of the US in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War; for that matter, the France of 1860 was also at 20 (but in 1913, its levels are half of the American ones, at 59.) In all, think anyone reasonable would call mid-19th century US or France “medieval”!
And as for total manufacturing output (Table 5), rather than per capita, the Russian Empire was in 4th place in the world in 1913, producing 77% of 1900’s UK levels; relative to its 1913 peers, its output was a quarter of the American one, half of the German one, almost 2/3rds of the British one, higher than the French one by a quarter, 2.5 times larger than the Chinese output and over three times larger than the Japanese or Italian one.
*Notably, that “Why No Roman Industrial Revolution” Collections does not attribute the emergence of the Industrial Revolution in the UK to its democracy or liberalism: which is actually quite a contrast with a number of economic historians, who downplay the role of coal mines and instead tend to emphasize the role of commerce-friendly institutions under liberalism (some have even argued that the secret sauce lay with such broadly unpopular elements as Britain’s trend-setting copyright law – or even the explosion of inequality following the land enclosures!) I don’t think the historical record is clear enough to unambiguously support one explanation over others; however, it does get one to wonder whether the Collections on this exact subject would have still provided the same explanation if it were written by Devereaux of 2026 rather than of 2022.
Appreciate the correction of the overcorrection, although I do want to say I was a bit hyperbolic and never actually compared the exact numbers (so thanks for that, I’m getting more and more enjoyment from this hard data approach, and will be sure to read up on that!). But I think the overall point that the USSR was having to catch up still stands, and that not taking that into account makes the comparison grossly imperfect.
I think HoI’s very particular time focus bends it towards pro-authoritarianism. Since Civilization 1 the typical approach of grand strategy, or Civ type games, is to give democratic governments huge bonuses to money and research. So that maybe a monarchy/dictatorship/authoritarian government might have temporary military success against a democracy, but in the long run the dictatorship will be vastly outresearched and buried by the superior economy of the democracy. Eventually the dictatorship government field a couple chariots against 50 tanks. Practically every EU player has taken Holland to world domination because of its huge economic and trade bonuses. A power with the focuses of Nazi Germany in 1836 Vicky would flop industrialization and be crushed by 1870. But HoI can’t do that because it simulates (effectively) maybe 8 years. The traditional democratic government bonuses don’t work over such a short period of time. And if the game starts in 1936 it is appropriate that it is easier for Germany to start the war than the United States.
But having read 1942 there are so many ways the Axis governments (and the USSR) were so bad at waging modern war. There have to be other ways to simulate that.
HOI4 also suffers heavily from just being set in a very limited timeframe which gives very little chance for a more gradual, “realistic” political development.
It lacks both the scope of time and the scope of political sub-unit representation; for instance the last point at which the USA could have avoided the course to win the war was probably the New York Gubernatorial election in 1928, and for Germany the last moment to avoid starting the war was probably when the Bavarian prosecution and judiciary decided Hitler deserved the minimum possible punishment for his first coup attempt in 1924.
IIRC the US does have more potential research slots (6) than any other country (usually capped at 5, the one exception being an alt-historical democratic Germany), which sorta nods at that.
Or at least, this was how it worked when I last played about 5 years ago.
To be fair regarding the Imperial Federation, it does *not* grant cores on India, South Africa (intended to be part of South Africa, appears to be all of it due to a bug), or British Malaya. This means that forming the Imperial Federation causes those places to be annexed without being cores, which means they start as occupied states with Compliance at 0. That in turn means there is immediate violent resistance to the new order in those places which, because of the resistance spread mechanic, tends to escalate unless large amounts of resources are spent on suppressing it, and in any case generally causes thousands or tens of thousands of casualties before Compliance can be raised enough to get the local Resistance Target to 0 and Resistance actually ticks down to that. The non-core status also greatly lowers their industrial productivity and strategic resource output, meaning that the best approach to Imperial Federation in terms of maximizing economic output is generally not to try to bring India into it (keeping India as a puppet), and to immediately re-release Malaya after the Federation event.
I would also note regarding the Imperial Federation not being a federation that various other federal states have the federalism “off-camera”, most notably the USA and Canada (though the USA does have the Congress mechanic). So this is not really an anomaly. The only country I think has mechanics reflecting being federal is Switzerland.
Possible typo:
“unsurprisingly, major players like the USSR, Germany, Japan all have very expensive trees;”
expensive or expansive?
Or extensive?
Somehow I think that if the Germans had successfully occupied the Midlands the UK GDP would have looked a lot worse by comparison.
I actually want to state this in a non-sarcastic form: using the USSR’s GDP as a measure of their government’s ability to mobilize the economy in 1942-1943 is nonsensical because of how much more powerful the effects of the German invasion were. The Soviet war industry could have been administered ineptly or masterfully and in either case the effect would be washed out by the damage it took from so much of their industrial core being occupied in 41-42.
Looking at raw GDP instead of the delta would be a poor measure in any case since that ultimately represents decades of prior industrialization more than the success of short-term emergency measures, but the effect of the occupation is so dramatic that you’d really need to make a detailed study to actually make this comparison.
GDP is a meme and it is really grim to see Bret appeal to it
There’s a point that using GDP *at all* is kinda problematic for command economies like the USSR.
Concerning your 4th footnote, when “casus belli” is rendered in vernacular English the convention is to translate casus as ‘case;’ thus “the case for war” rather than “the occasion for war.”
Typo: “in order to prepare the war for a civil war” -> “prepare the way”
On the article itself… usual disclaimer I’m not a HoI player here. But one problem for the sober alternate historian is that black swan events happen in real history, and they especially happen in times of war and struggle. If you polled the popularity of Bolshevism in Russia in 1912, it’d be what, 1%? Yet saying you don’t like the Bolsheviks was a good way to get shot in 1920. Or hell, the popularity of some Kerensky-like democracy wasn’t super high in 1912 either, yet they also ended up in charge. War & an economic crash reshuffled the deck. So if you want to do some “{Country} goes way off the beaten path” scenario, you do yourself a favor by picking the 1930s to do it in.
Also, not to get too cynical, but public opinion was moldable in some ways if not others. Yeah, white South Africans would absolutely not have accepted universal suffrage in 1937, absolutely would reject being a backwater of a giant mega-state, and would have revolted if told there was no choice. But… look at the USS Panay incident. Japanese society bought the ridiculous idea this was a mix-up and sent apology letters to the Americans, whom they mostly admired at the time. They weren’t spoiling for Pearl Harbor. Yet that didn’t stop them from supporting the war come 1942 – there wasn’t much of a Japanese popular resistance. Sometimes leaders really did “press the buttons” and just reshape society. (Admittedly, charging “political points” to do this is just a very video gamey thing, since yeah, it makes 0 sense for the government itself to be undermining itself. Just a game currency.)
When Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, the parent of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, took part in the elections for the Second State Duma in 1907 after boycotting the initial one (there were two more Duma elections after that, but they featured even heavier Tsarist interference than before, to create a “manageable” Duma which wouldn’t “need” to be dissolved almost immediately like the first two, so those election results aren’t as much of a marker for popular opinion), it had taken the third place, with 65 seats out of 518. (The first place went to the Trudoviks, whose plurality was nevertheless just 107 seats.) Now, you can claim most of their voters meant to support the Mensheviks (and in fairness, Lenin himself failed to get elected that time) – but the Bolsheviks were literally the Bolsheviks because the 1903 Second Congress had shown they accounted for most of the party membership, which was hardly unknown to the public, so…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1907_Russian_legislative_election
Further, while Lenin ultimately dissolved the 1917 Constituent Assembly because he couldn’t control it, he didn’t actually fare all that badly in the election; Bolsheviks and Mensheviks specifically stood as separate blocs, and the former got 23% of the vote, while the latter just 3% – in an election where Kerensky’s faction got plurality with 37%. Hence, whichever way you slice it, 1% in 1912 seems utterly implausible.
Uhhh….what do you think the (defeated) Revolution of 1905 was about, given that it specifically forced the Tsar to introduce the Duma in response? Further; what do you think Kerensky’s politics actually were? Hint: he primarily belonged to the self-proclaimed Revolutionary Socialists – and that name was anything but idle talk; before finally renouncing political violence in 1911, they perpetrated some 200 political murders throughout the 1900s (primarily during and soon after the 1905 Revolution.) Most notably, one of their members literally blew up the Tsar’s uncle (!), and others managed to kill 7 ministers and over 30 governors.
While Kerensky wasn’t in the party’s leadership at that time, he was friends with the leader of its armed wing and many of his subsequent speeches had praised them. The notion that opposing Lenin made him some kind of a moderate is hilarious (And with this blog being at the intersection of history and pop culture, I honestly wonder how much of this might be the standard “history drift” and how much the product of BattleTech lore and its depiction of a character they named after Kerensky…)
I will take the L that pre-WWI Russia is not quite an ideal example (I don’t know BattleTech, so nothing to do with that though), but I wouldn’t say it was a fully bad example either – the Tsarist government would have looked stable in 1912, and your example could easily be spun as “Kerensky decides he needs to work within the system rather than overthrow it”. But it really was overthrown. Fine, 1% Bolshevik support is an exaggeration, but even if we say 25% in the whole socialist-of-some-flavor, support still jumped in a fairly short period of time. The Russian Revolution remains in some sense an unlikely turn of events that happened anyway.
If the Russian example doesn’t work for you, to pick more WWI-era analogues as comparable yet not assuming the answer, the entire fallout in the post-WWI Middle East would have been crazypants for someone in 1912 to predict on sober, rational grounds. This is even if we restrict to local conflicts rather than the known instability of treaties parceling out territory. Ibn Saud in 1912 was one warlord among many with one dinky, inland city in Riyadh. He then pulls a move straight from Paradox YouTubers of taking a random one-province minor and conquering a bunch of territory and slapping his name on it to make Saudi Arabia.
Anyway this all goes back to the post – it’s fine to emphasize that some of the Paradox scenarios are unlikely, but that doesn’t always mean impossible, so there needs to some way to explore the unlikely ones. (Although I’ll admit that the Imperial Federation is pretty dang crazy, and probably less likely than weird stuff like Communist Britain or Non-Aligned Britain.)
I would say the issue with the most recent generation of Paradox games (of which I mostly play CK3) is not that black swans can happen but that it’s pretty easy for players to consistently trigger them and this gives a distorted sense of how unlikely they are and thus of the factors that cause them to be unlikely, which becomes an issue when people subconciously let it shape their views on modern issues, which does happen.
Also I feel reasonably confident calling MAXIMUM BRITAIN including India just actually impossible in the timeframe. India simply has too big a non-British population to securely hold by raw force and with Britain’s history Indians won’t agree to any power distribution that leaves them outvoted by bloc voting of the more British parts of the federation. I think the closest you get is federating everyone but India with England first among equals in some fashion and maybe big changes to policy in India that leaves it content as an autonomous region and maybe in the 21st century they integrate more than that.
Well, relative to him specifically. The rest of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) had boycotted the Duma elections after that second one, so he suspended his membership there and ended up selected as the head of parliamentary Trudoviks (often translated in English “Labour Group”) instead. That group had mostly declined throughout WWI – while he personally got popular specifically for advocating to go much further; around 1916, one of his speeches so openly implied that the monarchy needs to fall that the Empress was reported to have inquired within the inner circle if they could just hang him already.
If we are taking the 1907 Duma elections as even halfway representative – then no, socialist-of-some-flavor (the SRs, the parent party of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, then-minor “Popular Socialists” and the aforementioned “Labour Group”, who started out as a catch-all group of peasant-aligned representatives, but predictably gravitated towards more and more socialist proposals over time and ultimately merged with the Popular Socialists not long before the February Revolution) was over 40% at least; 222 seats out of 518. (Look at the link in my previous comment!) Note that this is basically a lower bound, only counting the self-proclaimed socialists. 76 seats went to what the English wiki terms “Autonomists” and the Russian one more accurately splits into two regional/ethnic-based groups – 46 seats of the “Polish Circle” party and 30 of the “Muslim fraction”. The assumption none of them had socialist beliefs is unlikely to be true; it’s even possible most of them did, even if they considered them a secondary aspect of their political identity.*
At the same time, the short-lived, post-February Revolution Constituent Assembly in 1917 ended up with “socialists-of-some-flavor” taking up 645 seats out 767! A parliament where the top 4 groupings literally went: Socialist Revolutionaries (324 seats), Bolsheviks (183 seats), Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries (110 seats), Mensheviks (18 seats); yes, every other group was below 18 seats (including the 10-seat Armenian Revolutionary Federation, to round out the socialist fractions.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Constituent_Assembly
So, even if the seat counts are taken at face value, the socialist sentiment in the Russian Empire had merely doubled from 42% to 84% over 10 years. On one hand, this certainly seems within bounds of what failing to win a World War (not yet officially lost at the time of the election, but rapidly getting there) would do; on the other, we must keep in mind that the Tsarist Duma election process was multi-stage and regionally + ethnically weighted in ways that were intended to dilute anti-systemic sentiment. While the process was especially blatant for the 3rd and 4th Dumas (rural landowners got the same number of reserved seats as the (“non-ethnic”) peasants (and the cities had separate seat reservations), differences in population size be damned), it was partially present at first as well. As such, it’s entirely possible that the unweighted Constituent Assembly election had merely revealed what had already by-and-large been the case in the Russian Empire of 1907.
Now, I’ll admit I haven’t yet had the time to read into the origins of Saudi Arabia, so I’ll leave it aside for now. (Although, I’ll note I’m not sure it’s all that unlikely next to, say the formation of Switzerland. Our host had remarked years ago that most insurgencies fail; and so do most personalist attempts to carve out a state. Sometimes, though, you get Algeria for one and Saudi Arabia for the other.)
*IMO, one of the most notable examples of how one could both be in an “ethnic” party in Tsarist Russia and also deeply on the left is Lev Mekhlis. He was born in Odessa (so heavily Jewish that even today (after the city was devastated by the Romanian-led Holocaust), if a joke in Russia/Ukraine mentions ‘Odes(s)a’, that’s a sure-fire indicator it’s a Jewish one) and around this time, he was an active member of Poale Zion, a Labour Zionist party. Then, he became an artillery man during WWI, and came back from the front to join the Bolsheviks and fight in the Civil War. Afterwards, he had a number of high-profile roles before Barbarossa – from being Stalin’s secretary in the 1920s, to spending seven years as the chief editor of Pravda, to becoming one of Voroshilov’s deputies** at the time of the Great Purge, in which he had actively participated. He was also sent in the field to supervise almost every one of Red Army’s pre-Barbarossa engagements: from Khalkhin Gol (and the earlier clash with the Japanese troops around lake Khasan) to the Winter War (only skipping out on “the liberation of Western Belarus”, since it took place when he was still in Mongolia.) During the Winter War, he is actually reported to have once led a breakout of an isolated group out of a T-26, where he took the gunner’s spot (after all, tank guns are much easier to operate than field artillery.) After the war, he was more-or-less the overall comptroller (“minister of state control”) up until he was paralyzed by a stroke in 1950, ultimately dying 2.5 years later (just two months before Stalin himself).
However, he is best-known for his post-Barbarossa career. That is, he essentially became the ur-example of a Commissar that went on to inspire the role in e.g. WH40K. Most “commissars” (politruk was the actual Soviet term) never really got to execute people, on the spot or otherwise; he, however, had been famously dispatched to the Northern front after the loss of Pskov, which involved a large number of artillery getting abandoned. He reportedly dragged the artillery General Goncharov out of his tent (where he had been drinking for the previous two days) in front of all the soldiers, asked “Where did your guns go?”, and after the guy just pointed somewhere in the direction of the Germans, he told them form a firing squad. He remained active on that front till the end of the year, and is said to have been quite popular amongst the rank-and-file.
Then, after the situation stabilized (Leningrad was still besieged, but its last supply link at Tikhvin was now safe) he was sent to Crimea, where a major naval landing took place the previous month and had at first succeeded in spite of e.g. virtually zero air cover***, but was now getting bogged down, failing to break out of a fairly small Kerch Peninsula (while the ambitious landing to a further-away Feodosia turned sour, as after taking over the place overnight, the relatively small marine force got defeated in detail over the next few weeks as the bulk of army failed to reconnect with them from Kerch). That main force (which eventually numbered over 200,000 people) ultimately never broke out of Kerch, and after several months of failed offensives, it was rolled up quite quickly by the German “Operation Trappenjad”; fewer than half were evacuated back to Soviet territory. The question of whether the responsibility for that lay more with Generals Kozlov and Chernyak or with Mekhlis specifically had served as a proxy war between Stalinists and anti-Stalinists since the death of Stalin – and ambiguous historical evidence also contributes to making it one of the more hotly-debated episodes of the war.
That is; on one hand, it’s not really in doubt that the Generals were afraid of Mekhlis, unsurprisingly deciding that their top priority was to avoid ending up as Goncharov and so they refused to give orders without making him verifiably complicit. (And vice versa; Stalin eventually telegraphed to Mekhlis that he criticized the Generals even when he ought to have been issuing commands in his own right.) On the other hand, he almost immediately telegraphed to Stalin that upon his arrival nobody could even provide an accurate personnel roster for any given division, or how much artillery it actually possessed. (This had at times been dismissed as implausible – up until the recent years have demonstrated otherwise.) The fact that Kozlov failed to account to much for the rest of the war, whereas Mekhlis wanted to replace him with the legendary Rokossovsky (which failed to happen only because the latter got wounded) is additional evidence.***** Either way; Mekhlis’ story is remarkable in no small part because while people with interest in history are reasonably likely to be aware that the Great Purges were primarily focused on the Old Bolsheviks, the circuitous paths their replacements had taken to ascend in the newly formed Soviet leadership are less commonly discussed.
**At that time, he also wrote a scathing report on the KV-1 prototype somewhere in 1939/1940, noting it was nowhere near reliable enough for serial production, needed redesigned sights, etc. – but was ultimately ignored.
***One reason why more people really ought to be more aware of the Crimean Theater of WWII is that this peninsula is quite close in size to Taiwan (27,000 km2 vs. ~36,000 km2) – and the distance between Feodosia and Novorossiysk is basically the same as the median distance across the Taiwan Strait. (The fact that it’s a peninsula also means that the German/Romanian troops could be supplied in a way the Taiwanese defenders cannot.) Sure, the distance across the Kerch Strait, where the main landing force went, is a lot shorter – but I still think the point that the USSR managed to reclaim a small city in a lighting naval assault across such a distance while starting from a much, much, much worse position than the PRC realistically would if they ever decide to “initiate reunification via kinetic means” is underappreciated.
****There’s also a claim from the legendary war correspondent Simonov that he forbade digging trenches on the assumption it would “corrode the fighting spirit” – however, Simonov was noted for his post-war anti-Semitism, and the idea one could command an artillery battery during WWI, as Mekhlis did, and not appreciate the value of earthworks deeply stretches credibility. All the more so given the alternate explanation – Kerch was (often still is) basically a muddy swamp for much of the spring.
Granted, that still leaves him and the rest of the command responsible for trying to assault in the months when the swamp benefited the defenders (i.e. Germans and the Romanians), then failing to appreciate how much the newly dry ground would benefit the Axis when they ordered a counteroffensive. But to be fair, at the point of Mekhlis’ arrival, the conceivable alternatives the course they had ultimately taken – losing thousands of troops attempting to attack through a narrow strip of mud to little effect – were keeping all the thousands of troops practically idle, yet still navally supplied at considerable expense for three months or so until they could finally go on the offensive in improved weather – or even to withdraw everyone to keep them out of German bombers’ way (a whole Air Army had been bombing that peninsula all along, of course*****).
Those were deeply politically unpalatable given how the operation started just a couple months earlier (with this sudden amphibious landing nobody on the Axis side anticipated, and which forced a dramatic repositioning of troops in short order) and the ultimate objective (not just to reclaim Crimea, but to not relieve the city of Sevastopol from a brutal siege, which involved a bombardment with “Majino cracker” artillery pieces mentioned by another commenter.) Not just Stalin, but practically everyone in the USSR really wanted to rescue Sevastopol, so the operation was called in December 1941 – yet once the initial breakout from Kerch failed, there were no good options left.
*****It is also worth noting that Kozlov, Chernyak, Mekhlis, etc. – all of them were all up against Erich von Manstein; yes, the architect of the Manstein Plan himself.
I don’t think there are any Kerenskys in Battletech who would be pro-democracy. Certainly not the big ones!
The notion that opposing Lenin made him some kind of a moderate is hilarious (And with this blog being at the intersection of history and pop culture, I honestly wonder how much of this might be the standard “history drift” and how much the product of BattleTech lore and its depiction of a character they named after Kerensky…)
To be fair, I’m not sure it comes from “Battle Tech” necessarily. It was in the ideological interest of both Communists in the Eastern Bloc, and capitalists in the Western Bloc, for different reasons, to overstate how moderate/centrist/”bourgeois” Kerensky and the Right SRs really were, so I wouldn’t be surprised that for those who haven’t looked carefully at the relevant history, it’s easy to come to the impression that Kerensky and his party/faction were not particularly socialist.
That having been said, I don’t know for sure how much of a socialist Kerensky *was* by late 1917- as far as I can tell, he had moved at least somewhat to the right over the course of the year, and he would be far from the first or the last politician to start out on the left and end up on the right. Since he never got that much of a chance to govern, I guess we’ll never know for sure.
The contrast with Victoria is remarkable; I recall a run of Victoria 2 in which fully integrating the Philippines after the Spanish-American war rather dramatically changed my demographic makeup, in ways that made it harder for me to develop the United States into a modern industrial state.
VickyII is an excellent game for making you feel that your pops are alive and have their own desires.
Victoria noticeable represents the population in a way that HOI4 just doesen’t. (technically there is a population number, but the only thing it does is that your potential manpower pool is calculated from that population number) Not even industry requires workforce. (though it is kina abstracted in that higher levels of conscription laws come with economic debuffs)
>Governments in Hearts of Iron do not fall, they cannot be overthrown, […]
This is only true in HoI4.
In Hoi2 elections would reshuffle your cabinet. If your dissent got too high, rebelions would brake out, your goverment might fall from inside or a forign supported coup. The WWI scenario would have your dissent tick up as losses mounted and your offencives failed to take the objectives your promised the public. Even something as simple as a favorite powerful power minister would get old and die.
I hope PartIIIb is “Why Darkest Hour is a better game than HoI4”
I came here to post this. HoI2 Darkest Hour is far better for politics, and IMO, everything. Brett really should try it if he hasn’t!
I’m pretty sure in Hoi4 if your stability goes too low (and war support?) then you also get negative events like rebellions and strikes and so on. Hoi4 also has coups, as in you can coup a foreign government, it’s just that the AI is very unlikely to do it to the player.
There actually *is* a set of “what if Hitler screwed up badly enough” mechanics for Germany. I can’t recall exactly how they work but there is a “Hitler screwup” counter in the background and if you rack up enough of them before a certain date and before IIRC, France capitulates one of the historical assassination attempts will succeed and you’ll get couped. (It’s mostly famous because, in HOI4 typica meme nonsense, it’s the way you can get Eva Braun in charge….)
HOI4 is I think interesting precisley because of how mcuh of it is kind of vestigial and weird holdovers from earier versions of the game (both earlier games and earlier versions of HOI4) like in earlier HOI the “political triangle” was pretty explicitly just about foreign policy alignment and didn’t match up much to anything else.
That said, HOI4, Because it is much tigher in timeframe, has a kind of major problem in that it wants to recreate the war “as it happened” at least in broad strokes, a game where germany falls in 1939 is, in some level, a failure mode, especially if you’re playing as say, the US. This leads to a bunch of wonky decisions to keep the game mostly “on track”.
A lot of the industrial might of the allied is also in the setup, and not in the modifiers: The allies has braodly speaking, more civilian factories than the Axis does. (though not to the extent that is historical) since civilian factories are both A) More expensive to construct than military factories and B) compounding (since you use civilian factories to build civilian factories, etc. etc.) this tends to mean that the Axis has a headstart but has to win the war (or at least get an insurmountable advantage) before the allied industries can really get going.
Eg, starting civs are something like:
Axis:
Germany: 35
Italy: 21
Japan: 24
Hungary: 10
Romania: 11
Bulgaria: 11
Finland: 7
Allies:
UK: 31
France: 33
US: 128
USSR: 46
Canada: 13
Australia: 11
British Raj: 10
New Zeeland: 4
South Africa: 9
This doesen’t quite shwo the entire dynamic since focus trees tends to give various degrees of “free” civs*, but the point is, the allies tends to have a much stronger economy over time, and the “win con” of the Axis is generally to use their early game advantage to take out the allies before that happens. MP games in fact usually has to put in extra houserules to make it even a bit of a fight.
* though afaik, the allies tends to have a higher count there too. With some exceptions made for focus tree power creep
“Democracies that guarantee the independent of other countries”
-> independence
“because the political system is both not granular enough to model the Norway Debate”
I don’t know if I’m misreading the sentence, but I think the word “both” should be removed
“you only choose if you intend to ideology switch to that ideology”
I don’t know if “ideology switch” is a specific in-game term, but if not, the first “ideology” can be removed
“in order to prepare the war for a civil war it intends to lose.”
Remove “the war”
“as equally frequent the case”
->frequently
I’m curious, are there any grand strategy games that try to model the internal politics of democracies, without making that the entirety of the game? i.e., there’s the Democracy series, but it’s entirely focused on internal governance (foreign policy is barely included), and losing an election is a game over.
I can think of 2 possible approaches.
1) The player is a party, not a country. When they lose an election, they’re relegated to opposition status, where their ability to affect the game is severely limited (mainly using whatever procedural tricks are available to stop the other party from completely screwing over the country before the next election). Of course, the obvious problem is that playing as the opposition is unlikely to be very fun, so players may well treat losing an election as a de facto game over. Although, now that I think about it, this might be a decent approach for multi-party parliamentary systems as, if the player is the opposition in a minority government, there could be some interesting strategic decisions in whether to support the ruling party on confidence motions, or trigger an election.
2) The player plays as a country through successive governments/administrarions (the “Deep State”, if you will), but there’s some mechanic (similar to the stress system in CK3) that incentivizes players to act in accordance with the current party’s ideology. Of course, this would allow the player to deliberately undermine the ruling party in order to get another in power which has some, uh, conspiratorial implications.
Well, Victoria kinda does it? Generally by restriction what you can actually do depending on the party in charge.
Republics in Imperator: Rome are far from perfect but I think they’re a good compromise with player agency. You have a senate support rating, and if it’s low, many of your actions will incur tyranny, which makes characters less loyal, and also lowers the threshold for triggering a civil war.
There are three parties (democrats, traditionalists and oligarchs) which each have a semi-random agenda every year. They can be pretty minor (e.g., build some province improvements) or quite large (e.g, declare war). There’s a whole bunch of complicated mechanics that determine the composition of the senate. I usually treat it as basically RNG, but there are ways for the player to manipulate it if they want to.
The party that has a plurality of seats will push through its agenda and this can only be prevented by burning a huge chunk of senate support on a veto. You can choose to fulfill the agendas of the other parties for a small boost in support.
I think Victoria is a better compromise, though my full post got lost in the ether because I’d been writing it in phone email’s browser client. Basically you essentially must make a lot of law changes over the course of the game but your pops go to interest groups based on various factors and you need interest groups that support the changes to pass the laws, so to get anything done that landholding aristocrats don’t like (during the Industrial Revolution…) you need to indirectly strengthen other groups slowly over time.
And basically if you’re an autocracy you have a lot of freedom to form a government of various interest groups however you like with the caveat that you probably need to have the one your autocrat is from in the government and it’s not good if you have the Industrialists and the Trade Unions in simultaneously and such. But if you’ve got voting rights then you have elections where each time one comes around the interest groups form parties and having a party in your government is all or nothing; if the Industrialists and the Petite Borguise and Intellectuals form a united party you take all three or none at all. And each election is 180 days where every party gets a “momentum” score at the start that is then impacted by options you pick in random events, and at the end they get a share of the vote dependent upon momentum and how much various peoples’ votes count between a ton of extra votes for rich landowners and One Man, One Vote and this is combined with their base influence to determine how powerful they are in government. You can form a government of the losers, but the less absolute a monarch your ruler is the worse an idea this gets; it’s basically a parliamentary coalition and cabinet and if it doesn’t in actuality have a majority of the vote it’s not gonna be able to accomplish much and the voters feel cheated and will start protesting, rioting, and maybe even launch a civil war.
What I don’t understand is why the whole political system exists, when forms of government are changed by clicking in the focus tree. What I mean is, why would I pick a monarchist advisor if the actual way of making my country a monarchy is bee-lining for the appropriate focus?
They could just make a war game with an alt-history choose your own adventure bolted on if that’s what they want without the token political “simulation”. Paradox seems to have a tendency to stuff relatively complex mechanics in places where they accomplish barely anything.
Honestly, it’s vestigial. HOI2 and 3 didn’t have the focus trees. (all the railroading was handled by events and the political system, while you could shift it somewhat, was fairly on-rails too)
A lot of the time the reason you ahve these kinds of weird bolted-on stuff is because they did something, changed their minds, and then never removed it/kept it there. It’s one of the clear problems with Paradox’s “gradualist/DLC-driven” development model.
The Focus trees was basically a compromise for those who hated the event-driven railroading but they still wanted the game to “flow” mostly the “right” way. The degree tow hich this is successful is…. debatable.
I *think* (it’s been years since I last played, I kinda bounced off HoI 4) that in order to take the appropriate focus there’s generally a requirement that you have enough support for the corresponding ideology. So you get the advisor to change public opinion until it gets to the point where you can take the focus.
Yep, that’s usually how it works. (not to mention that often you need to do certain focuses to unlock the advisors in the first place)
The Tigray War is a go again. The aftermath of the Pretoria Agreement saw an internal struggle in Tigray between those who wanted peace versus a temporary ceasefire and the latter won. Ethiopia has stormed into Mekele, but the TPLF leadership are signaling they plan to go to ground again. In theory Ethiopia could enable the sympathetic Tigrayan elements and gradually defang the TPLF. The risk is the same thing happens as last time, Ethiopian atrocities spur Tigray unity, then Ethiopian military disaster. And Ethiopia *can’t* afford to repeat that as this time the Amharan nationalists and Eritreans are aligned with the TPLF.
Its worth noting the origins. Eritrea and Tigray were both forged in a 15-year struggle against the Derg Communist regime resulting in highly militarized mass mobilization societies (both have repeatedly managed to field 5% of their population). Tigray is a young society but its top leadership is mostly old veterans like Gebremichael. The result is a quite large (peaking at as many as 350,000 men) force that has extensive experience (albeit low-tech) climbing up and down the insurgency to large-scale conventional fighting scale as appropriate.
The Tigray War lasted 2 years, but most of the military losses were in a cumulative total of just 6 months of some of the highest-intensity conventional warfare of the last 50 years (easily exceeding anything that has happened in Ukraine which has mostly been a relentless attritional slog). The Ethiopian Army’s successful offensive at the end of the war involved perhaps 3X the troops of the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine and an estimated 90,000 casualties for them in a single month. For context, that is a comparable intensity to China’s failed invasion of Vietnam in 1979!
Further on “popular movements don’t matter” and possibly jumping the gun on occupation- If you conquer one of the colonial powers, UK/France/Portugal/Belgium/Spain, you can also take over all of their colonies in the same peace deal. I can take Morocco or Tahiti from France just as easily as I can take Alsace-Lorraine, and the Tahitians or Moroccans get no more say in the matter, nor a (non-scripted) option to keep fighting.
The only Paradox game I have ever played is STELLARIS, and it suffers from exactly the “meme politics” problem described in this essay in pretty much every aspect of the game (nearly everything is spelled out accurately, the importance of random effects are minimized, etc.). From spending time on the forums, it’s obvious to me that much of the player base suffers from… use your nice words, Dave… certain mental quirks that render them unable to deal with ambiguity, unable to gracefully handle unexpected events, and unable to shrug and take the “L” when they get hosed by something that is basically out of their control.
Assuming the player base for other Paradox games is similar, the “meme politics” in HEARTS OF IRON may simply be a deliberate attempt to cater to… nice words again, Dave… those certain mental quirks, rather than an attempt to advance any particular theory of government.
I think this is unfair to Stellaris and at least the Stellaris players I’ve mostly seen.
Firstly, UNLIKE the historicals, Stellaris is not billed as “a realistic-ish game in [period]”, it’s billed as “What if the Federation from Star Trek allied with the Protoss to fight the Daleks, then the winners got dragged into the Vorlon-Shadow War?” It has no pretensions to simulating a theory of history, it’s about being a melting pot of Space Opera stuff. So Determined Exterminators get a bunch of bonuses to compensate for being at war with everyone and not claiming pops on conquest not to represent an idea about history but because if the Protoss and Federation easily curb-stomped the Daleks that wouldn’t be very fun for anyone.
Secondly, at least in reddit community I frequent, people actually love randomness and getting hosed by stuff outside their control most of the time, although I think no one ever really likes the feeling of staring at three buttons without knowing what they do beyond that it’s real important not to pick the wrong one so they’re not fond of ambiguity there but neither is anyone in history when the stakes are high from what I can tell. But they’ll roll the dice on the Horrific Inverse Mass and hope that the TOO LATE! modifier on their homeworld is bluffing.
EU, CK, and Victoria are all clearly presented to observant players as ‘villain simulators,’ with Vicky having the most room to play a ‘good guy’ game where you merely exploit foreign markets by exporting advanced manufacturing instead of actively creating colonial impoverishment to exploit. But when you play those games you either have fun by not thinking too deeply or by role-playing, because it’s a portrayal of a time when agency was reserved to advance only bad things and even the best-intentioned people were only aware of choices between different kinds of doing harm.
HoI and Stellaris are different, they want players to be able to win while also feeling like heroes, and this creates much more room for players to completely miss the point w/r/t villainy, and by a much wider margin.
> The Soviet economic mobilization during the war (conducted in the context of extreme military pressure and lost territory) was undeniably impressive, a feat of will and sacrifice, yet in 1942 and 1943, the United Kingdom – not the British Empire, just the United Kingdom – was outproducing the USSR in total GDP despite having a tiny fraction of the landmass and around a third of the population.
I mean, to be fair, the United Kingdom was not having its core industrial and resource nodes being shorn away by a massive land invasion that collapsed its GDP by nearly half. It suffered some German bombing and the dislocations of the submarine war instead, but these were still not comparable to the damages inflicted upon the Soviet industrial and resource plants. An interesting thought exercise I’ve always run in my head is what the Soviet war economy would have looked like had it not suffered the economic losses it did in 1941-42 and the results are pretty telling: large-swathes of lend-lease (though not ALL of it) that are frequently called ‘irreplaceable’ becomes instead redundant. I’d attribute
Of course, the ‘chicken and egg’ issue then raises its head here. The fact the USSR suffered such economic losses in 1941-42 were a product of massive military defeats inflicted upon the USSR in 1941-42, which in turn were the product of strategic-operational decisions made both by it’s leadership in 1941-42 and before the war as far back as the end of WW1… decisions driven by it’s leaderships ideological outlook and political structure. The dance of circumstance and human agency is ever complicated.
Also it is funny to see Bret trying to downplay the soviet role and defend the ridicously, pathetic and coward behavior, situation and actions of the British, Uk contribution to the war was very minor compared to the USA (the former would have lost the war if not by the intervention of the same or their colonies) and soviets.
(Cough) Molotov-Ribbentrop (Cough)
And before you get all huffy, unserious people don’t get serious replies.
It’s quite possible that there wouldn’t have been a Molotov-Ribbentrop pact without Munich. People should really stop pretending that history starts at whatever point in time is convenient for their ideological position. Real life is much more muddled than that.
George Orwell (one of those “premature antifascists” who’d volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War) was appropriately scathing about the motivations of British political elites in the leadup to the war, writing in July of 1939:
And yet, those British political elites end up looking downright heroic when compared with the actions of the Soviet Union in 1939.
The comparison is far more apples-to-oranges than Westerners often seem to want to admit. Violently annexing eastern Europe and subjugating/annihilating its peoples was one of the core avowed pillars of Nazi ideology, so it seems pretty understandable why the Soviet regime would want to do everything possible to ensure that the Nazis’ inevitable war of racial extermination would be fought on as favorable ground as possible for the prospective victims, particularly if the Nazis could be maneuvered into going to war with the Western allied powers first. When the alternative is being on the business end of Generalplan Ost, a lot of odious near-term political compromises become pretty easy to frame as the lesser evil.
By contrast, sympathy for Nazism among British elites like the abdicated King Edward was deep and ideological, not necessarily just pragmatic, and the Nazis in turn saw their relationship with the UK as a rivalry between two great Germanic world empires with similar colonial agendas (“Russia will be our India”) that didn’t necessarily have to come to open war unless forced by political circumstance.
I will point out that Britain and France were so reluctant to get involved unless they had to because much of their leadership had served or been close to someone who served in WW1 and infamously that was a brutal blood-soaked mess no one felt had been worth what it accomplished. So they didn’t want another one and thus let Hitler go unchecked at first, and then when he started expanding Neville Chamberlain didn’t have the standing army or political will at his beck and call to immediately counter-invade but did set about rearming. And as of the invasion of Poland they realized Hitler wasn’t going to stop unless stopped and set about going to war while Stalin partitioned Poland and proceeded to actually supply and thus help enable the Nazi invasion of France.
Certainly some of the elites of every nation were Fascist sympathizers but no other member of the Allies proactively supplied the Nazi war machine or did a joint invasion.
I remembered the book: The Triumph of Broken Promises by Fritz Bartel.
If Dr. Devereaux is looking for inspiration for potential gameplay mechanics that could give democratic political regimes a leg up, I think we may have a winner!
@Skinner “it seems pretty understandable why the Soviet regime would want to do everything possible to ensure that the Nazis’ inevitable war of racial extermination would be fought on as favorable ground as possible for the prospective victims, particularly if the Nazis could be maneuvered into going to war with the Western allied powers first”
Both of these conditions were met in September 1939. The war was being fought on favourable ground from the USSR’s POV (i.e., someone else’s), and the Western powers were at war with Germany. Also, if the goal is to ensure the war is fought on favourable ground, actively assisting the Nazis in dismantling a buffer state between them would seem counterproductive.
The 1 remaining reason not to declare war on Germany then was that the USSR genuinely wasn’t ready for war at that point. But that isn’t “apples-to-oranges” with the Western powers’ thinking; not being ready for war was one of the main reasons for Appeasement in the first place. And yet, leftists always seem to view the latter as cynicism or cowardice, and the former as simple pragmatism.
(To be clear, I don’t think any major power comes out of the 1930’s looking particularly good, but I also think that the USSR manages to fall short of the very low bar set by Britain and France.)
I’m not sure how you imagine the Soviet Union declaring war on Germany on 1 September 1939. You do realize they didn’t border each other and Poland sure wasn’t going to let the Soviets march through its territory – this was a big obstacle to saving Czechoslovakia in 1938 which basically doomed the French attempt to shore up Czechoslovakia by making an alliance with the Czechs and the Soviets. The Poles were adamantly opposed to any cooperation with the Soviets in defense of Czechoslovakia and in fact once the Germans pried out the Sudetenland, the Poles took over some Czech territory for themselves (Teschen).
Also one has to remember that Germany beating France in six weeks was a shock to everyone, not least to the Soviets whose strategy of gaining time while the capitalist powers were fighting each other was basically working during the Phoney War. Pretty much every protagonist (even most of the German military brass except for Hitler and Manstein) believed that the war would settle into the WW1 pattern, with both sides exhausting themselves at the static front while the British would apply their blockade. From that POV staying out of the war until ready was smart even if it was known that Hitler’s real ambition was always going to be expanding the German Lebensraum to the east.
@GT *Shrug* Even the (“ridicously, pathetic and coward”) approach taken by the British and French, declaring war then mostly not doing much, would’ve been a marked improvement over what the USSR actually did in 1939. Hell, even a strictly neutral approach where they stay out of the conflict entirely and *not supply either side with critical resources* would’ve been an improvement.
And, from a purely Machiavellian PoV, sitting back while your enemies duke it out probably seemed like the smart move, but
1) This is the exact sort of cynical “buying time with other people’s lives and territory” that Orwell was criticizing the British elite for in that quote.
2) As I already alluded to, the USSR was not exactly neutral during that period.
@Ben L again you missed my point that the USSR wasn’t bordering on Germany so it physically couldn’t declare a war and hope to do much of anything. While you point out that Britain and France didn’t do much (although it is often exaggerated) they at least had an actual front with Germany and their strategy was precisely to keep the front static and attack Germany by blockade and strategic bombing which is exactly what they did (why I think their inaction is overexaggerated). Again, in August 1939 everybody expected a new Western front to be another repetition of 1914-18 with static defenses and slow war of attrition based on blockade and bombing.
I also disagree that trading with a side means you’re not neutral. I mean, the US infamously supplied Hollerith machines to Nazi Germany which were used to implement the Holocaust – does it mean the USA were not neutral but allied with the Nazis? It just leads to total nonsense – like Europe continuing to purchase Russian oil means that they are not neutral and on the side of Russia – even though they are arming Ukraine? It’s better to separate trade and belligerency to avoid such nonsense conclusions.
‘Pathetic and coward behaviour’ like surrendering after the battle of france?
No wait britain kept fighting as practically the only ally power until russia and america join in 1941. Britain effectively fights germany, and italy while preparing against japan simultaneously. This is hardly coward behaviour especially given britain likely could have entered a peace treaty without an immediate invasion but chose instead to continue the war effort.
Not only that but in 1940 britain manages to attrit german air forces which would then make german air-support in the eastern front smaller than otherwise.
Not only this but britain would be fighting the mediteranean theater while stalin is busy purging his generals and leaving the USSR very vulnerable to the Nazis.
And after the germans predictably invade the USSR britain supplies crucial lend-lease without which the soviets may have collapsed in the early days.
Denigrating one of the allies when the success of all of them is rather interlinked is very dismissive and only serves to demonise a people I’m sure you personally dislike.
Marcelo was definitely being rather inflammatory in his wording. You make fair points, though not all of them are fully accurate.
China began fighting in 1937, and had been fighting throughout the entire period you mention.
In 1940, some unfortunates were still getting getting arrested and executed (typically on the basis of “confessions” from earlier processes), but the purges of actual top prewar leadership – Tukhachevsky, two other Marshals (out of five, leaving only Budyonny and Voroshilov) and all the generals aligned with Tukhachevsky – took place in 1937. The purges then spread down to mid-level commanders in 1938 – which really did by the far most damage, since 1938’s junior officers had to try and (generally fail) to control whole divisions in 1940-1941.
Either way, the only fighting Britain was doing at the peak of Soviet purges had consisted of bombing Palestinians (“one 250 lb. or 500 lb. bomb in each village that speaks out of turn” – said by the same “Bomber” Harris who is best known for orchestrating Lancaster streams during WWII).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936%E2%80%931939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine
This mostly depends on how important one thinks the delivered Hurricanes (mediocre relative to both German fighters and even the newer Soviet models) and the contemporary British tanks (better protected than the German ones and more comfortable/far easier to aim from than the T-34, but also slow, more prone to bogging down due to high ground pressure and with limited offensive power) had been for the Battle of Moscow (they have not had the time to enter any of the earlier engagements), where they represented about a third of the non-light tank force. (However, if any infantry needed support vs. other German infantry, there was fairly little difference between the light T-60 and a Valentine or Matilda; none could effectively deliver high explosives.) Wikipedia’s page on “Arctic convoys of World War II” cites Andrew Boyd’s “Arms for Russia & the Naval War in the Arctic 1941–1945” as outright saying “The tanks and aircraft did not save Moscow but were important in the Soviet counter-offensive.”
One need to look no further than UK after the war to see how much better is UK compared to Soviets (I’m not counting USA here).
Comparing UK (a colonial/lend-lease based economy) with the Soviets is not fair, btw
https://crithis.quora.com/British-History-and-World-War-2-The-Economic-Perspective
The Soviets got a lot of Lend-Lease.
The UK/British Empire still got 3X as much of it, though. Literally $31,4 billion vs. $11, which often gets understated in these discussions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#Significance
Since the post had introduced the idea of “meme politics” to the blog, I think it’s fair to say that the “meme” understanding of Lend-Lease is that of a thing which mainly (if not exclusively) went to the USSR, so while Marcelo is perhaps being abrasive in pushing back, I can definitely see the underlying frustration.
Not a bad article, but there is tons of misconceptions, oversimplification and fantasy mixed with history there.
Yes, but what is your opinion about the game’s elimination of the SPD?
Here’s one possible tweak to subvert the meme politics nature of the focus trees: Make it so that whatever is displayed is not what WILL happen, but what your advisers SAY will happen. What actually happens depends on the quality of your advisers, popular support, and various behind the scenes factors representing whether your country can accomplish the goal. And the focus tree shifts depending on the results, so the next option on the tree might not be what was promised. The focus may succeed as planned, it may only give a fraction of the bonuses it should, rarely it might give MORE bonuses than expected, and sometimes it completely bombs.
For example, you are playing as Communist China and select a Great Leap Forward focus that says it will give you +25% food production and +10% steel production, leading to focuses on weapons research or further industrialization. Select it, and instead you get a peasant die-off, a portion of your steel reserves disappeared, and your next focus options all deal with what desperate measures to deal with the resulting famine.
This also provides a good way you can give democracy an advantage over totalitarian groups: The deomcratic advisers are from a group accountable to the people, who actually know what the people can do, and not some cadre of yes-men or your most loyal thugs Peter Principled way beyond their wildest dreams. The more authoritarian you are, the more likely you are to get advisors who promise the moon and deliver an asteroid impact, the more likely the people are to discretely sabotage your plans, etc.
I actually might play the game if that’s how it worked! In fact, I would go further and note that this kind of thing ought to apply to military-industrial decisions as well; the development of military technology almost never proceeds as it was initially intended.
Ironically, I would say even our host ended up forgetting that recently, when in his Bluesky response thread to the trailer of the recently announced Starcraft, he decided to go into WWII analogies and contrasted the care depicted for armor suits with how the T-34 was supposedly designed to be disposable which is…not true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouCCJqv73Ng
And of course, thinking that it was true itself effectively represents “meme politics” approach: the notion that a state, after approving a vehicle heavier than just about anything it built for ground forces up until this point, which combined a number of technologies neither it nor anyone else had a lot of experience with (sloped armour, high-capacity diesel engine, a larger, longer gun than that of any other tank at the time, etc.) can then also will it into reliability. Thus, if it is not reliable, then it could only be because it was intended to be disposable.
(Now, a number of production shortcuts did in fact take place in the first year or so after Barbarossa, such as some tanks famously getting shipped without seats, the crews expected to roll up their coats instead. For the Stalingrad plant, the situation was obviously even worse as the fighting crept ever closer. I don’t think such ad hoc approaches really count though. I am thinking of those stories where British tanks shipped to Desert Rats in North Africa were eventually ordered to be disassembled immediately upon arrival and put back together from pieces again – the crews simply didn’t trust them to work properly without seeing them assembled with their own eyes. Does that also count as part of the doctrine, intended in advance?
P.S.
Sounds nice – but at most, that theory needs to be a general guide, not an absolute; i.e. the interwar France and Belgium exist, and also need to be accounted for.
*For what it’s worth, the NationStates web game (began in 2002, and still going!) sometimes gestures at this, AFAIR: i.e. when you get the event with an option to cut taxes, the advisor pushing for that will always tell you it’s good for an economy, and I think it’s often is, but if you are a socialist/communist state, it gets collapsed instead. Having said that, the Australian creator has (had? haven’t checked on that in a long while) strong libertarian beliefs, and this affects the systems in rather notable ways.
This actually sounds like a very good idea. Although I think that, for gameplay purposes, there should still be a level of transparency of what could happen, otherwise the game would probably lose too much appeal (especially for a broader market).
OTOH, I absolutely love the approach of adding the level of transparency as a function of government!
It’s astonishing to me that Solar Nations 2, a paradox-like or HoI-like game with a (probably) right-wing solo dev, as a more intricate, less fascistic conceptualization of internal politics than HoI4.
There is an overall Stability meter, which is slowly increases or decreases towards some baseline, adding or removing laws burns chunks of Stability, various conditions and statuses can increase or derease the baseline, possibly into negatives or over a hundred. Togglable late-game events offer huge military and economic advantages at the cost of extreme instability generation, making stability sources (energy production, welfare progrrams, cultural traits) a late-game bottleneck.
In the game’s conceptualization of politics, ideology is downstream of factions or social classes, which the game treats as the same thing. Each faction -rural laborers, urban middle class, old-money aristocracy, corporations, state beurocrats, the military, and ‘ideologues’, a catch all for everything from priests to party apparatchiks to prolific online poasters- each have two percentage values, power and loyalty, each of which is the sum of many different factors. Every law is associated with a faction, and the strength of it’s bonuses is multiplied by it’s faction power. You cannot keep every faction happy, so the goal is to keep powerful factions happy and unhappy factions powerless, which is easier said than done.
Low stability causes factions to be unhappy, a faction being unhappy for too long can cause a revolt, the size of thsi revolt is proportional to the faction’s power rating. Loosing a civil war could cause anything from a loss of territory to a forced shift of laws or government type.
Your overall ideological alignment is the sum of your factions powers, laws, and a few others. The six ideologies are, clockwise, liberals, libertariansism, traditionalism, fascism, communism, and ‘technocracy’ (which doesn’t seem to have a real-world analog).
Your overall government type, of which there are about a dozen options (many gated behind technologies) can be anything. If your ideology and your government type are aligned you get an extra bonus, if they are not aligned you get a penalty. Interestingly, this means that you can have a liberal dictatorship or a fascist democracy; it’d cause a instability and anger factions, but at least at default difficulty the dissonance is pretty manageable.
A lot of the details are eybrow raising, but theres a a lot of depth that HoI lacks. It really does feel like your society is an unruly horse you’re trying to point vaguely in the intended direction, ithout ever feeling unmannagable.
That sounds like it’s a copycat of Paradox’s other games, actually, down to a global “Stability” meter from EU or Imperator and the factions/social classes are straight from Victoria 3’s Interest Groups.
It’s the existence of the rest of the catalog that makes HoI stand out for lack of realism. Even Stellaris gives more depth and that basically just has politics so Fanatic Egalitarian Xenophiles feel like the United Federation Of Planets while Fanatic Authoritarians have an implicit end goal of becoming Galactic Emperor and earning the This Is How Democracy Dies achievement. Honestly I spent a long time being annoyed that there wasn’t a way to reorganize the Galactic Community into a pan-galactic government where my Fanatic Xenophile Pacifists based off a manga about genetically engineered teenagers immune to radiation going into the radioactive ruins of Tokyo could be Galaxy Police without having the Class Presidency become a hereditary monarchy.
But anyway in Stellaris you have three points to spend on Empire ethics with two levels for the individualist empires of normal or fanatic and opposed pairs of Materialist-Spiritualist (“Q is no god, just a powerful alien” vs “We are guided by a divine hand), Egalitarian-Authoritarian, Xenophile-Xenophobe, and Pacifist-Spiritualist, and your Empire Ethics determine how you can organize your government and what policies you can enact, and then your people have one of these ethic categories and join a Faction of that ethic which gives them a baseline happiness depending on how the faction likes your policies (with some hybrid factions, like if you’re xenophobe pacifists the respective factions want you to basically stay home and let the galaxy sort itself out while xenophile pacifists want to be part of Space NATO and spread peace) and you get a resource named Unity from a combination of how happy a faction is and basically how many rights the pops who have joined it have, and can spend it on social reforms up to and including discarding your organic bodies to live forever as perfect machines (Spiritualists do not like that idea in general but when they let you start the game as a society of autonomous robots with a DLC they made this less total). And every pop gets attractions to each ethic based on a huge range of factors, like if they’re living on a planet with free aliens and are free themselves they get xenophile attraction but if they’re enslaved or live with alien slaves they get xenophobe attraction, and they get attraction towards the Empire Ethics and you can get bonuses to how strong this is as well as spend abstract resources to directly impact the attraction of a faction and also impact their happiness based on how you’re treating them. And you can shift towards an ethic on the empire level, losing a point in another one, by embracing a faction.
Also since this is sci-fi you can play a biological hive mind, which can be Eywa from Avatar or the Tyranids depending on other choices, or a collective machine intelligence ranging from Skynet to the WALL-E robots, by taking the Gestalt “ethic” instead of any standard ones, in which case you do not have politics and also usually you don’t need to make ipads and happiness does not exist unless you are the kind of robot that keeps its creators in gilded cages.
Oh, as for Imperator my take on it is essentially that I basically didn’t feel like I had any meaningful influence on Senate support outside of doing the missions IIRC once per decade and each faction had a button that did a thing and also appeased/strengthened them.
There are a lot of complex mechanics but with the giant array of other forces dictating what you do relating to the characters who impact the Senate I just basically never felt like I had the opportunity to pick someone for a role in order to influence the Senate because of everything else I needed to balance. I also looked at the election mechanics on the wiki and basically party leaders automatically get total support from their party in elections so the eligible candidate with the biggest party wins and I don’t think you can displace a party leader short of exile or murder and there’s way too much potential backlash to do that much.
So I also treat it as RNG except I do quests or push buttons when I need to get more support, tank Tyranny when I need to, and in the Mission Trees analogous to focus trees you can sometimes pick options to impact it and occasionally need a specific number, like in Athens if you want to restore Democracy and get free of vassalage you need to take options to discredit and eliminate the family installed by your overlord as pseudo-Tyrants and hit IIRC 60% support to vote for independence.
So, just as I predicted in a comment a few weeks back, Bret is insisting that Hoi4 is appealing to fascists because it represents a “fascist” model of politics where individuals don’t matter and what matters is the state. Now, as many already pointed out, it’s not a problem because HoI4’s focus is on the operational simulation of WW2 and the rest is scaffolding. Bret thinks that as a grand strategy game HoI4 must have a deeper model of politics and not just the armies. It’s interesting that he has an issue with that, I seem to remember his praise for Europa Universalis IV for focusing on states and relations between states to the exclusion of everything else. Nobody claims that EUIV was a bad grand strategy for that and in contrast the recent EU5 is facing controversy for focusing too much granularity on internal affairs and individuals.
“We’ve seen this problem before, where Paradox titles struggle to decide if the player plays as a government or as the disembodied ‘spirit’ of a state, but of course the idea that nations have spirits at all is a loaded, contested one, bound up with nationalist notions of ‘national destiny.’”
Bret then goes on to pile on by hilariously tying the mere notion of player agency to nationalism (implied, fascism). No, the player playing not a government but a spirit of the nation in that he has control over things normal governments have no control of doesn’t mean the player is acting out some nationalist dream. In many PDX games the player can completely dissolve the nation and replace it with another one (so-called tag-switching) that no nationalist would ever think of doing.
“the strategic downsides of autocracy – particularly the tendency of autocratic leaders to order foolish, wasteful military actions out of arrogance, ignorance and pride – were abundantly on display in the Second World War for both the Axis and the USSR”
Are you really arguing that democracies can’t engage in foolish, wasteful military actions out of arrogance or ignorance? Set aside all of Churchill’s hare-brained schemes and operations, we don’t need to go that far back, we had an example just this year (Iran war anyone?). Frankly as anyone who’s read his Thucydides should know the notion that democracies don’t engage in wasteful military operations doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny beginning in antiquity.
Generally this polyannaish view of WW2 as liberal democracies proving their superiority over autocracies can’t really be sustained. Germany lost not because it went to war against a liberal democracy but because it fought much more powerful economies. Now we can argue whether the development over the centuries of these powerful economies in the Anglo-American sphere was connected with the development of liberal democracy but this is outside the period in question. Despite all the wonderful Czech democracy, when faced with overwhelming power of Germany it chose to give up rather than fight to a pre-defined conclusion. When German autocracy went against a free-wheeling expansive democracy in France it won and the French collapsed in weeks.
What is even more telling is the way the war was actually fought. To win the war, liberal democracies deliberately moved in a more authoritarian direction. Individual liberties were suspended in favor of wartime censorship, governments engaged in active propaganda amongst their own populations, free markets were distorted in all kinds of ways by the government assuming the controlling heights of the economy and centrally directing industrial production, putting wartime restrictions on consumer behavior and generally controlling the distribution of economic resources.
Bret has a pro-liberal bias and it shows.
If you blame the foolish military actions of the autocracies to its political system, can you also say the fact that the Allies abandoned Czechoslovakia, failed to save Poland, lost France in just 6 months is because of democracy as well?
*ack, I mean 6 weeks.
Yeah, he seems to have really bought into the wartime propaganda framing of “liberal democracies vs autocracies” which was recognized to be a simplification already at the time. Even setting aside the Soviet Union, the British Empire (and it’s important to remember that it wasn’t the UK alone that fought the war but the British Empire) can hardly be called a liberal democracy either. It was recognized at the time in the tensions over the Atlantic Charter and afterward when the Americans faced the uncomfortable ask of fighting for restoration of European colonial empires in Asia. Not that the Americans were consistent upholders of democratic values either – they were perfectly happy to prop up Chiang Kai-shek who certainly wasn’t a paragon of liberal democracy.
Yeah, but let’s be real here–in the case of Chiang Kai-Shek, there was no liberal democratic alternative. (Now, if you want to talk about how FDR favored Claire Chennault’s “strategic bombing from China will bring down Japan” approach, which coincidentally didn’t involve the KMT reforming, vs. Joseph Stilwell’s “make the Chinese army actually functional” approach that would have involved the KMT reforming, that’s a different story.)
He praise EU4 yes, but not for the state focus that he had in fact critised a lot.
Also your prediction was about the military focus being fascist not the politcs. You are cherrypick to prove your point.
Wait until the next week when he will talk about occupation and war crimes (and their absence in-game). That will more immediately touch upon the military aspects.
He explicitly praised EU4 for its state focus because it captured the way in the Early Modern period the international system was shaped by competition between states. I’m just pointing out it’s weird he doesn’t view WW2 in the same way. I can kinda agree that in the long period running up to WW2 individual ideologies and movements started to exert a transnational role (which is captured in Victoria games for example) but WW2 narrowly taken was in many ways the acme of state competition.
So and to be clear this is entirely sincere without any sarcasm. Based on linked comment I expected much worse argument so good job I guess. This makes senses to argue against at very least.
So you are of course correct that he praised “componention between state thing”. You are are howver ignoring the part where he critized it for portraying states a hegomenic and essentially omnipotent while ignoring consequences on inhabitants. It is important to rember that one can critise and praise something at the same time.
Anyway as such it is perfectly consistent for him to critize Hoi4 for lacking portrayal of interal politics. If anything I would say EU4 has better internal poltics as lowbar as this is.
Because the interwar period wasn’t shaped by competition between states, it was shaped by mass politics within established states. Even when the countries of the world lined up into warring factions, the choice of sides for countries was determined by which popular movements had gained legitimacy within those countries, not by national strategic calculus; the one major attempt to act like the world was still the world shown in EU was disastrous as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact nearly cost the Soviets everything. You can say the war itself is inter-state competition but even the war was far more about international cooperation than competition, in a way that wasn’t true earlier.
Hoi4 focuses on WW2, not on the interwar period. There’s a reason the game starts in 1936 and many players skip through the pre-war period as fast as they can. The alliances and ideologies are pretty much set in stone at the game’s start – that’s why you need ahistorical focus trees if you want to change your orientation. Within this framework it’s perfectly fine to focus on states actually waging the war, there are other games (like already mentioned Victoria) which deal with the development of the mass ideologies underpinning those states.
Also why do you think the MR pact cost the Soviets almost everything? Given that Barbarossa failed in significant part due to the hopeless logistics of the Wehrmacht, it’s hard to argue that additional strategic depth that the Germans had to cover didn’t contribute to German logistical overstretch. If you are thinking about the fact that the USSR put massive army concentrations next to the MR line in a forward defense posture which then led to those armies being encircled by the Germans, it’s not as if there was no MR pact, the Soviets wouldn’t still put armies at the old frontier liable to be encircled in the same way. Except now those encirclements would be much deeper into Ukraine and closer to Moscow and the Volga allowing the Germans to shorten their logistics. Clearly adding strategic depth helped.
There are essentially two distinct questions here:
1) Did the Pact ultimately worsen the Soviet position?
2) If it did, did the USSR come close to “losing everything”?
For the former, the most important argument is that the Pact obligated the USSR to trade key supplies with Germany; according to Edward Ericson’s research (cited on the page below);
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Commercial_Agreement_(1940)
This alone is likely sufficient to end the argument; however, an additional factor is that the most important encirclements at the start of Barbarossa were enabled by about half of the Army Group North suddenly turning south after occupying Lithuania (the other half went on into Latvia and Estonia and then towards Pskov and ultimately Leningrad) and cutting off the Red Army in “Western Belarus”. This would have been much less likely to work with Soviet troops at the old border arrangement even if we assume the most favourable scenario for Hitler – the Baltic states behave like Belgium and stay independent and unaligned up until Group North cuts through them on the day of Barbarossa more-or-less unimpeded.
Other scenarios (the Baltics are occupied by Germany sometime before invading the USSR, or their governments join the Axis) easily give the USSR casus belli at a time that’s inconvenient for Germany. Alternatively, the USSR could start flooding sympathizers in both the occupied Poland and the newly occupied/Axis-aligned Baltic states with weapons, daring the Germans to do something about this outburst of partisan warfare before they have even secured Western Europe. And likely, without the Pact, Stalin does not go for the Winter War, preserving a not-insignificant amount of Soviet fighting force. (Although some have argued the war was useful “dress rehearsal” which helped address a number of organizational and doctrinal issues; i.e. the PPSh came close to being cancelled by what the Americans would have called “battle rifle” enthusiasts who thought the expensive, slower-firing yet much longer-ranged SKS was the future – until the engagements in Finnish forests have proven otherwise. Nevertheless, it’s unlikely to have made up for the enormous losses of both men and material.)
Another factor is simply that of the Soviet border fortifications; there was a set originally built in the early 1930s and reinforced circa 1937-1939, and then those on the post-Pact borders, built mainly in 1940-1941. (Nowadays they are often called “the Stalin Line” and “the Molotov Line”, respectively; of course, those terms were never used officially and come from German propaganda.) Obviously, there wasn’t enough time to build meaningful defences in the newly occupied regions, and almost none of the new bunkers were close to finished at the time of the invasion.
On the other hand, the old defences as they actually existed even at their historical peak are often overrated*; they were built by a generation of military architects many of whose would-be teachers fell in the Civil War or emigrated in its aftermath, so at its worst, there were cases like the Pskov Fortified District, whose bunkers were built with limited consideration of the water table and so many ended up flooded to about knee-height. (Ironically, by far the best-designed defences, at Leningrad’s Finland-facing flank, had also faced the weakest opposition.) Nevertheless, there’s not much doubt that the enormous effort invested into the futile attempt to build the new defensive line (something like 200,000 workers were engaged in that daily; the territory was just too large) would have made far more of a difference if devoted to reinforcing the old one.** (For one thing, with the core bunkers already in place, the reinforcement would have primarily needed “interstitial” and back-line fortifications that could have been much smaller and thus were far more likely to be usable by 1941.)
And as for the latter; I presume it relies on the assumption Lend-Lease wasn’t a sure thing for the USSR (there was in fact substantial Republican opposition to including it), and it would have lost the war without it, as written down by Khruschev and as Zhukov was overheard saying by the KGB in the 1960s. This seemingly straightforward line is somewhat undermined by the overwhelming majority of Lend-Lease only arriving after Stalingrad and by Mikoyan, who was actually in charge of the logistics***, reportedly saying the lack of Lend-Lease would have “merely” delayed victory by a year or a year and a half. (This exact figure was more recently echoed by David Glantz.)
Altogether, this raises the possibility that by “lost”, Zhukov and Khruschev meant a scenario where the USSR fails to dislodge the Axis from behind the Dnieper and other major rivers and defensive lines, so the war is stalemated, rather than that of the German troops somehow marching from Kursk to Moscow and beyond. (Which would be reminiscent of how in recent years, Ukraine and its boosters have tended to use the two meanings interchangeably, based on whatever was the most rhetorically beneficial at the time.) To be sure, both scenarios are unambiguous defeats, but only one of them “loses everything”.
The other argument is that historically, the USSR got lucky due to Germany not performing as wisely as it could have after the summer of 1941. (I.e. some have argued that giving up on replenishing Rommel in North Africa could well have refilled all the losses the three Army Groups’ panzer divisions had sustained that summer.) However, Germany had already performed much, much closer to its “hypothetical maximum” relative to France and the USSR especially, and the additional tweaks would have squeezed out relatively little. (I.e. if Barbarossa Panzer losses were comparatively limited in the summer, that was due to both the disorganization of much of the front and chewing through the prewar tank/anti-tank inventory. September 1941 is approximately the point when the T-34 was getting widespread and new infantry anti-tank weapons emerged (from the much stronger 57mm anti-tank gun to ZIS-3 field gun possessing entirely adequate armor-piercing qualities to anti-tank rifles making it near-suicidal for all those tank models to assault trenches practically point-blank, as they were once used to doing), all of which would have sharply limited the value of even several hundred extra tanks when compared to what they were able to achieve in the summer.
* (in large part due to revisionist mythmaking by “Suvorov” (Rezun), who expanded the fact of heavy weaponry pulled off those old bunkers to fit the newer ones into the ridiculous notion of bunkers getting outright demolished with high explosives)
**Even more could have been done if the USSR gave up on some very ill-conceived megaprojects – such as the attempt to construct tunnels beneath the Dnieper. The military logic of it seems sound (bridges can be bombed and destroyed for good; tunnels of such enormity could at most have their entrances caved in, to be dug out fairly quickly)…up until you consider that bombing bridges is very, very hard (25 years later, the US repeatedly failed to destroy Thanh Hóa Bridge in spite of deploying tactical bombers with >10X the payload of a Stuka; eventually being forced to invent “TV-guided” bombs to do so. Meanwhile, nowadays, those same bridges over Dnieper are still safe: Russian cruise/ballistic missiles are generally still not precise enough to travel the required stand-off distance and still hit the bridge itself at the end of it) and a comparatively small number of AA guns ought to have been more than sufficient. Instead, many thousands of workers and massive quantities of reinforced concrete that could have been used for fortifications went to make a start at a tunnel that would have been finished by the second half of 1940s at the earliest.
***He was also the brother of Mikoyan who is the “Mi” in MiG.
“I’m just pointing out it’s weird he doesn’t view WW2 in the same way.”
Why should it be weird? We’re talking about different times with radically different political systems here. In the EU4 timeframe, the majority of the people wasn’t participating in politics in the same way as in the 20th century. This same model – and arguably, in EU4 there appears to be even MORE of internal politics than in HoI4 – just works much better with one timeframe than the other.
Guess we’ll see how the rest of the series turns out, but I certainly went “ugh, GT was right and I was wrong” reading this part.
It was always clear that Bret comes with his own biases (what historian doesn’t?) but it did come more to the fore in recent times. For example, his quitting Twitter in favor of BlueSky was kinda on the nose in terms of his political biases (and I say it not as a big fan of Musk, in fact I find Musk’s political opinions facile and I can’t stand the cult around Musk viewing him as Tony Stark – but still I haven’t quit Twitter over it). I still think Bret has many useful things to say when writing about the things he knows well – like Mediterranean societies in antiquity – and that’s why I read his blog. But when he writes about things beyond his expertise, especially modern history where his political biases impinge more directly, I do tend to read them with a skeptical eye.
This is only tangentially relevant, but I think it will interest a lot of people here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwxPyMxb2_Q
Jonathan Parshall, the author of “Shattered Sword” (about Midway), has recently finished a massive book about the course of the war in 1942. He sat down to talk about that year for two hours on the “history undone” podcast, where they discuss both real and alternative history with a retired admiral who is also very well-read about ww2 history.
Essentially, the case he makes (to my ears) boils down to this: the war was *not* a foregone conclusion. It certainly wasn’t the steamroll of large powerful democratic economies over the puny Axis that some current popular histories make it out to be. It was really an epic struggle, and there’s a lot of things that could have gone differently, at least in that year. The fighting in the Mediterranean was an especially close call, in an area where the US and USSR really couldn’t offer much assitance at that time, but the entire war was interconnected across every single theater to the point where it almost defies the human ability to comprehend it all.
In that spirit… Hoi4 might, ironically, be a reasonably accurate (at least in spirit) simulation, where there were a lot of different outcomes possible if certain specific operations had gone differently.
I haven’t read Parshall’s book (and admittedly his and his coauthor’s Shattered Sword on the Battle of Midway was excellent) but I listened to this podcast last week and the guests unfortunately evinced understanding of WW2 military operations on the level of a Hoi4 gamer and not a serious historian. It was hilarious watching them speculate about the Germans sweeping the Brits out of the Mediterranean and the Levant and attacking the Soviets over the Causasus (lol) in the Hoi4 tradition of drawing arrows on a map to Moscow and pressing the start offensive button. There are good logistical reasons why Rommel was stopped at the border of Egypt at El Alamein and frankly by this point in 1942 with hundreds of German divisions stuck deep into Russia there was nothing the German high command could do to reinforce Rommel and change this outcome. Also to be fair to Parshall (even though it undermines his overall point about the supposed crucial significance of 1942) he repeatedly says during the conversation “yes, this could’ve gone different but no, it wouldn’t actually change the outcome, it would just delay the US/British operations by a year or so.”
I do not agree with that summary. Both of them have *extensively* discussed logistics, although admittedly less in this particular podcast than in the ones more narrowly focused on a particular front. It’s safe to say they know more about logistics than you or I. They weren’t talking about “sweeping the Brits out of the Mediterranean,” they were talking about what a tough spot the British would have been in if the battles for El Alamein had gone differently, and how that would have complicated the political situation. And it’s not so much “attack the Soviets over the Caucauses” as “if the Soviets have to retreat across the Caucauses, they’ve already lost everything of strategic importance.” “just delay the US/British operations by a year” is, in fact, a *massive* difference from current history, especially if that year involves mass genocide and redrawing borders in the Middle East.
It seems you haven’t been listening very closely to that video. They were clearly talking about the Germans taking over the Middle East and striking across the Caucasus. What does “if the Soviets have to retreat across the Caucauses” even mean? Where would the Soviets “retreat” across the Caucasus, into Turkey? This makes no sense at all. The Germans moving into northern Iraq, taking the oil fields and threatening across the Caucasus as they discuss in the video makes some sense, it was even considered as a grand strategic option by the leadership of the Kriegsmarine in 1940-41. But by 1942 it was a pipe dream, with clearly impossible logistics.
Regarding the delays: Parshall talks about counterfactuals delaying the US/British operations by a year not only in the Mediterranean but also in the context of Guadalcanal. Again he himself admits that this won’t change the outcome since the Americans will still be able to come in force the next year.
Of course, in the context of mass genocide any counterfactual delays would be horrific. The Germans managed to exterminate the huge and vibrant Hungarian Jewish community in a few months once they moved into that country. But in this context every Allied setback could be classed as significant and every year could be seen as a turning point (as 1944 was the turning point for the Hungarian Jews). This doesn’t prove the importance of 1942 at all.
One alt history I’ve always dreamed of is, what could happen to make WW2 an eternal war. Not USA or Germany win, but eternal stalemate. One that ruins both nation heavily. I guess it’s more possible for WW1 without USA though.
I feel nuclear weapons get a say here. You might have them not be invented until the early 1950s, but that is well within the length of eternity.
I think neither WW1 nor WW2 could be a true eternal stalemate, with the closest you might get being a Korean War style permanent shaky ceasefire. The wars quite simply consumed resources, and particularly in WW1 soldiers, at a rate that couldn’t be maintained politically or physically for very much longer than it was. Especially for the Axis due to blockades and potentially Britain’s home islands if they+America hadn’t turned around the Battle Of The Atlantic against the U-boats.
For WW1, the obvious answer is that when the French army mutinies and refuses to attack France just cuts a deal with Germany to return to pre-war borders and no one else wants to stay in the war when France/Germany has dipped on their side but if they keep fighting the one on the other side might smash them and the underlying territorial disputes continue simmering until someone thinks they can succeed on a new attempt or nukes get used in an unrelated probably Pacific war and it becomes clear no one would win a nuclear war so they hash something out diplomatically. As for the US not joining, with the British blockade and superior industrial might when combined with France and its colonies (which the Central Powers had no way to threaten outside of submarine blockade and Britain was starting to put useful antisubmarine weapons into production) France and Britain were actually already winning before Americans arrived in Europe in strength. It just would’ve taken probably a year or two longer regardless.
For WW2, either Hitler decides not to invade Russia after all or the fighting is indecisive enough Hitler and Stalin opt to reach a ceasefire that carves up Eastern Europe, possibly facilitated by the US opting not to send nearly as much in the way of trucks, materials, etc. so the USSR has to devote a lot of its production capacity to logistics the US filled in our timeline and won’t have the supplies to build and run as many factories. Once FDR makes it clear Japan will stay embargoed for oil until they withdraw from China, Japan blinks instead of doing Pearl Harbor, possibly requiring a coup by cooler-headed officers who could see where that leads.
Britain now has Europe blockaded but can’t stop U-boats from hunting food shipments and such. With their colonies backing them and the threat of invasion by Hitler obviously existential the Royal Navy gets all the supplies and funding it needs to forbid Operation Sealion for quite a while. Hitler possibly makes a Jutland-like bid to break out with the surface fleet, fails drastically, and essentially gives up. With the US not funding the Manhattan Project as a critical national security effort and from what I’ve read Germany just totally on the wrong track and thinking a nuke you could put in a bomber is physically impossible the atomic bomb isn’t invented before all participants accept a stalemate. The Nazis can’t truly maintain control of all of Europe in the face of popular resistance forever and either their conquests break free entirely like India does from Britain or get de facto autonomy on the level of Texas relative to DC if not greater.
I wonder you are aware of an old FPS which basically did have that premise about WWI. Of course, that was really mostly an excuse to mix WWI, WWII and Cold War aesthetics and technologies rather than a halfway serious attempt at alt-history, but nevertheless, it existed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Storm_(2002_video_game)
P.S. Wow, I had no idea Bet on Soldier: Blood Sport was from the same team and was implied to take place in the same world of eternal war. Not that it matters, since neither game is believed to be particularly good even by their genre’s standards, but nevertheless…
Haven’t read his work but my understanding is the relative industrial numbers are simply too comically slanted to allow a clear Axis victory where they sieze London and DC without literal magic; Germany was never going to secure the channel and even the total loss of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl would not give the Japanese the ability to conduct a meaningful invasion of California before the US had more ships than Japan did. And that’s what people mean about allied victory being “inevitable”.
That said I could see the Axis run the table in 1942 with Stalin purging the wrong generals and causing the Red Army to fail to perform historically, Britain struggling in the Med, and the whims of fate at Midway meaning it’s Japanese bombers hurling down at US carriers unexpectedly mid-refueling. The latter would be less decisive because better American damage control practices would likely let most ships get back to Pearl or at least get aircrews with experience clear, but if the Axis opt to quit while they’re ahead I could see them getting a deal that leaves them with Europe, plus Japan having a free hand in China and all colonial possessions in the Pacific, with Germany and Italy getting everywhere in Africa and the Atlantic too small to be a British dominion.
The flattening of multiparty democracies into a single Dem/GOP or Labour/Tory uniparty could almost have been inspired by Julius Nyerere’s quip that “the United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.” At least in the US case, it doesn’t seem inherently out of bounds to describe the two major parties as essentially semi-official arms of the government rather than political parties as such, so whether to treat the institutional structure of electoral politics as two parties or as one party with two wings starts to look more and more like semantic nitpicking. That said, even if you do accept the idea of the US as a one-party state run by a combined Democratic-Republican Party, a lack of appropriate mechanisms to model “intraparty factionalism” between the two “wings” would still be an enormous problem, every bit as much as a lack of appropriate mechanisms to model intraparty factionalism within the NSDAP or the Bolsheviks.
On the subject of advantages afforded by procedural democracy, I forget the name of the book and author, but it was framed around the question of why the Eastern Bloc regimes collapsed in the 80s/90s, the thesis being that while political elites on both sides of the Iron Curtain were forced to implement broadly similar sets of unpopular economic austerity measures during that period, the perceived legitimacy of democratic proceduralism enabled Western states to better weather the resulting popular blowback by essentially convincing their angry constituents that this was what they’d voted for, and that the solution to their grievances was to vote differently rather than to revolt against the entire system. (Cynically put: democratic political systems are less brittle because they’re better at gaslighting their own people into submission.) Of course, for a game to implement this advantage, the possibility of a mass popular uprising against widely-hated policies would need to exist as a meaningful constraint on the player’s freedom of action in the first place.
It’s actually a lot simpler: In earlier games the differences were largely international-political, rather than trying to represent the internal political systems. (there’s still some vestiges of this, eg. Finland is “non-aligned” in the game since having democracies and fascists being allies causes a bunch of problems, as anyone who’s run into the schizo-allies “Invite-kick” cycle knows)
The game was largely about (as Bret points out) operational aspects and the political systems (such as they were) were largely there to either constrain or allow you to direct theseoperational stuff. HOI2 actually had basicallye verything on sliders (gated by cooldowns)
Over time the scope of the game has kind of expanded and this has lead to the political (and to some extent economic) background becoming woefully inadequate for the increased scope of the game.
The earlier HOI’s really were fairly strictly military rather than grand-strategic affairs, with some allowance for also controlling the stuff that feed into your military, like military industry and a lot of the politics being outside of your control, to a greater or lesser extent. (the assumption is less “You control the poltiics” and more “the politics are ongoing in the background and you just deal with the output as it refers to the military”).
In practice HOI2 didn’t even require you to do stuff like declare war a lot of the time.
The shifting meaning of the “ideology” mechanic in the HoI series reminds me of nothing so much as “alignment” in the early history of Dungeons & Dragons. As I understand it, originally, when D&D was essentially a fantasy spinoff of the medieval wargame Chainmail, “alignment” was simply a mechanic that restricted which fantasy units you could put in the same army as each other. But as the game came to focus more on individual characters than armies, alignment mutated into the personality test/proto-Reddit-political-compass… thing… that would be one of the most-argued-about aspects of D&D for decades.
Actually a pretty good comparison, yeah.
Tbh I think much of the DnD argument is from people who totally missed that only Outsiders are usually supposed to be pure exemplars of their alignment and mortals just make their own ideosyncratic decisions and the gods have opinions on the decisions they make which may also be ideosyncratic.
Paladins are supposed to be the only class walking on a knife edge with their Oath, which is far stricter than simply being Lawful Good, and even there the class description and roleplaying advice emphasizes they’re not Lawful Stupid and if in a Lawful Evil society if asked where fugitives are they have zero obligation to assist and in fact are duty bound to oppose the government, they just have to be truthful and tell the SS straight up they’re not helping (then stab them).
Though I do think people, even some writers, got misled into thinking True Neutral is an axiomatic force in the setting like Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos, when it’s meant to be a grab bag of just folks who do not have strong opinions on society and people/gods who have figured out you don’t want any axiomatic force running the world unchecked. When Good wins as an axiomatic force it tends to think mortals who aren’t Good are Evil which is not great news for mortals who are less Good than the Positive Energy Plane, AKA all mortals
What’s under talked whenever we talk about “what happened in 1971?” Is that it didn’t affect only western countries. If anything, communist countries got even worse. Like, they’re usually still respectable until that time period, even North Korea and South Korea is still on parity. Yet after that, while some metrics in USA got worse, communist countries decline hard until collapsing. It should also be noted that 1990s have the worst USA crime rate. Those trends only reverse in the 2000s.
What made that happen? Computer? Climate change? Lead in blood? Fuck if I know.
@wondrousd,
That’s a really interesting thought you have right there. It puts me in mind of a discussion I listened to earlier this year with Adam Tooze, where he was discussing the centrally planned communist economies, and he made the argument that it’s not as simple as saying that they “didn’t work well” or “didn’t work as well as the western countries”, because there are actually times, places and situations (both in the modern and premodern eras) where we know planning has worked quite well. He thinks it’s more correct to say that all industrialized countries faced a crisis between the mid 1970s and late 1980s, involving the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial service-based economy, and for whatever reason, the capitalist countries were able to manage that transition better than the communist ones. I’m more sympathetic to the communist states than Tooze is, or certainly than Dr. Devereaux is, but I think there’s a lot to that argument to make you think. The discussion is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch4ePuk8T9k
I’ve often said that “the mid 1970s was the peak of human development in the industrialized world, and it’s been downhill since then”, but of course the emphasis there is the industrialized world. I think you can make a good case that ordnary people in both the First and Second Worlds were happier and in some senses better off in the 1970s than they were today, but of course that’s not going to be the case for people in the developing world. You would have to search long and hard to find anyone in Africa or South Asia, or for that matter East and Southeast Asia, who thinks that their country was better off in say 1975 than it is now (and it would probably be someone who’s *extremely* ideologically motivated). For that reason alone I do have to be *somewhat* sympathetic to the idea of progress over the last half-century.
I guess those metrics do be outdated for service-oriented economy? Maybe those communist countries because they push too hard for the outdated metrics? I’ve never seen this angle before and I’d like to know more, so thank you for the discussion.
Personally I think the industrialized world has made massive material progress in the form of I can easily get something I want shipped from Japan via the internet and we have much better medicines and as we saw with COVID mRNA vaccines, but for non-college men we broke the idea of “A good day’s pay for a hard day’s work” with automation and offshoring and didn’t socially manage the tradition to let ex factory workers feel self-worth and killed town communities. And between the internet and expanding TV channels and suchlike we also broke a sense of collective identity where you know everyone in your neighborhood and you all watch the same stuff and talk about it. I’m a particularly extreme case as a shut-in who just doesn’t enjoy socializing and can talk fine but instinctively assumes people on the street hate cold approaches by strangers as much as I do, but I actually literally don’t know the name of anyone but my family in my neighborhood. I’m content with this socially but concerned about not having any friends I could count on in a pinch who have met me in person, and the vast majority of people don’t do well without talking to people face to face a lot.
This think is good point to make. I have seen it argued that people feeling bad about modern world is sillly becuase of how good we have it. In some ways this argument may be correct, but it kind of misses the fact material comforts are not everything. I do not wish to live like my ancestors sure, but I think it is fair to say that material progress is not everything.
Yeah. I think some of the yearning to go back is false nostalgia where people overestimate how much a factory salary paid for and forget how difficult and dangerous the work was, especially people who weren’t actually alive before the transition, but I think the internet did really kill a sense of community where you would have to hide being gay or other parts of yourself but if you had a bad car accident you’d likely have help that’s not just a not-big-enough check from a faceless government agency and a driving feature of our politics is people feeling like they’re teetering on the edge of a cliff as a result, and combined with various price increases of certain things and more tech coming down the pipe a lot more people are thinking “I’m okay now but any second I could lose my job to AI/immigrants/just buisness failure, not find another, and be starving or on the streets”.
And that’s made politics volatile as everyone desperately wants to have the assurance they’ll be able to keep their current standard of living and retire peacefully after setting their kids up to do the same or better back. At least so far I don’t think that’s actually overall less likely but it sure as hell feels less likely. And the explosion of silos of social and regular media means we don’t have a shared sense of reality, much less community, and even reputable sources have a negativity bias for clicks.
I was born in the 90’s and feel like the 2008 global financial crisis broke something important in trust the future will be bright and we haven’t gotten it back and both MAGA and the DSA are built on promises that doing something drastic will fix that.
“And between the internet and expanding TV channels and suchlike we also broke a sense of collective identity where you know everyone in your neighborhood and you all watch the same stuff and talk about it.”
I disagree. What we broke was the default community–or, rather, the curated community. In the past a very select few decided what was acceptable and what wasn’t. They chose what you watched on TV, what you listened to on the radio, what you saw in the newspapers. People could go through life without thinking too much about entertainment and the like because it was handed to them.
Here’s the thing, though: There were a LOT of us who were left outside that default community. At best we were ignored, and often worked hard to be ignored. At worst, the community was actively hostile to us, causing mental, emotional, and often physical anguish. People died. A lot. Look at how many women drowned getting water in the past sometime. Or drug use among housewives in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. For men, look at what happened to homosexuals and nerds and the like. Look at lynching as well. And remember, for every reported case there were hundreds if not thousands of unreported cases. I once had a guy try to shoot me because I listen to the wrong kind of music.
(And if you think “He’s really harping on how bad women had it”, yeah, I am. The default culture essentially defined an entire gender as wrong. Look at banking sometime. Or work. Look at how many times a woman had to get her husband’s permission to do business.)
So many of us don’t have a rosy picture of the past. That default culture wasn’t a comfort, it was a threat. I would much rather have the opportunity to build my own community, based on shared values, than to be forced to hide because I happen to have a hobby that the default culture says is considered wrong. The stress of finding like-minded people in the Information Age is so much less than the stress of worrying about my physical safety that there is absolutely no comparison. If it means my neighbor and I chat about the weather instead of a TV show, I’m fine with that. Because it means my children won’t know what it means to grow up in a world that wants you broken or dead.
As an autistic nerd with other disabilities I do not think the default community was great for everyone, but the fact that our new communities are geographically dispersed means I can’t ask my internet friends to let me crash on their couch and such because I don’t even know what state they live in. And that matters, and politics today is trying to roll back to the default community (which I think is indeed a bad idea) or replace it with the government (which I think is better as long as the DSA doesn’t elect Stalin 2.0, which I’m worried is possible).
“…but the fact that our new communities are geographically dispersed means I can’t ask my internet friends to let me crash on their couch and such because I don’t even know what state they live in.”
This is not a universal experience. I’ve crashed on couches of friends I’ve met via the net, and had friends I’ve met that way crash on my couch. And note that the internet is not the only advance in communications technology that has improved since the 1970s. If you doubt this, you must not have a kid with a boyfriend/girlfriend–cell phones, even old flip phones, allow a level of privacy I wish I’d had in the 1990s! Music also drastically changed with the rise of cassettes and CDs.
I think one of the assumptions you make is that of geographic dispersion. We’re not as thin on the ground as people think. The default culture of the past tried to paint us as far thinner on the ground than we are–you had The Nerd in a high school on TV, or maybe a handful of them, for example. But once you start getting together regularly you quickly find out there are more of you in your city than you realize. I know a business that ran into this. They intentionally became a hub for a local group (minority religious group) and had to move to a bigger space because there were so many people showing up that there wasn’t room for them all.
This is why something like Pride Parades are so important. It shows people who are in these marginalized communities that there are more of them than our culture currently leads folks to believe. Sure, maybe only 1% of the population is in the group in question–but that’s still 3-4 million people, and probably a few thousand in your city.
I agree that it matters. I’ve been saying for a long time that our culture is in a major transitionary period. Folks like Trump and his administration–and many of those who elected him–are losing the power and prestige they had (or at least thought they had) and they are afraid. And many of us believe going back to the default culture of the 1970s would be a death sentence (often with very good reason). This is a clash that’s been going on since the 1960s (just for fun, look up when the domestic service industry bottomed out sometime), and we’ve sort of just been making good-enough adjustments for years, slowly increasing the population we consider acceptable. But with the internet accelerating the rate of group-formation (look at Starbucks), the Pandemic, and a few other things, the pace is accelerating past what many can handle.
For my part I’m hopeful. Once the dust settles we’ll be in a better place, in large part because there are far too many people who won’t let the dust settle until we are. But getting there will be a bit uncomfortable for many of us.
I do think it could end up better, but the 1930s and 1940s were also a transitory period so I am not super thrilled at the prospect of living through one.
And yes, there are people who make good internet friendships they can call on for physical aid, but I am not suited to that myself; there’s more than one way to not fit in. So what friendships outside close family I have close enough I would feel I could ask them to get my mail from my house when I’m in the hospital are with people in Brazil or Eastern Europe or suchlike rather than a small group at the local church or at work. I realize not everyone had a small group they could talk to, but I wouldn’t dismiss the fact that a lot of people did.
Personally I think the industrialized world has made massive material progress in the form of I can easily get something I want shipped from Japan via the internet and we have much better medicines and as we saw with COVID mRNA vaccines, but for non-college men we broke the idea of “A good day’s pay for a hard day’s work” with automation and offshoring and didn’t socially manage the tradition to let ex factory workers feel self-worth and killed town communities.
This is very well taken, and my statement was a bit flippant. (Deliberately so, it was meant to counter what i see as the equally brain-dead worship of “progress” over the last half-century). I certainly don’t think the industrialized world is worse off in all respects since the 1970s: Scientific progress alone has accomplished a great deal, both in terms of our understanding of nature and in terms of allowing us to deal with serious problems like COVID. And in point of fact, it is true that in many respects, whatever the problems with modernity, the only way out is through: dealing with the environmental damage caused by modernity, for example, requires more modernity (more contraception, more education, development of alternative energy sources, more intensification of agriculture, virtual communication replacing in person travel, and things like that). I don’t actually think we should, or need to, or even could go backward in the strict sense, what I’m more thinking of is what elements of past economic and cultural models might be better alternatives to the liberal-capitalist postmodernity we have right now.
I think a lot of my issues with the current order in the US, and to some extent in some other western countries, do fundamentally boil down to how manufacturing employment has collapsed without anything equally good to take its place. I’d say the *cause* of that gets to deeper issues I have with capitalism, postmodernity etc., but the most obvious and clear symptom is the underemployment crisis.
That being said, I should also modify what I said above that “no one in South Asia or Africa would prefer 1975 to what they have today.” That’s clearly not quite true either. My mom, for example, often expresses nostalgia for the India in the 1960s and 1970s, even though it was materially a lot poorer, and compares it unfavorably to India today. Some of that, is, like I alluded to, for explicitly ideological reasons, i.e. “I miss when we were governed by civilized secular aspirationally-socialist politicians, instead of by people who just want to make a lot of money, have a lot of goodies, and impose their language and religious views on everyone else.” But, some of it is also something deeper I think, and has to do with all of us viewing the era when we were teenagers or 20-somethings thru a bit of rose colored glasses.
From what I’ve seen regarding statistics the average person is mostly better off in total; the federal minimum wage has been static but actual wages have outpaced inflation. “Factory towns” have more-or-less died and are riddled with “deaths of despair” like suicide and accidental drug overdoses but in most places employment is fairly good. People, even people who lived through it, have a distorted impression of how much a 1970’s factory job salary would buy. Since everything from a factory had to pay for those salaries relative cost of a lot of stuff was higher.
However, what is gone is stability. Factory workers could work the factory until they got too old or too injured then retire on a pension, while nowadays I lost a job requiring a college degree where my managers liked me in under two years because it was eliminated in a merger and blue-collar workers are on much thinner ice where a single unexpected absence even if they call in can get them fired. Almost no one gets a job straight out of high school and rides it to retirement. Gig workers are increasingly common due to poorly-written independent contractor laws and tend to be worked harder and paid less than would necessarily even be legal for direct employees and have zero job security or even predictable wages. I did some gig work for AI training (I made a point to stick to mostly coding) and it was nice to set my own hours but some days I’d log in and there just wouldn’t be anything paying the usual rate I was qualified to do so I had to take half pay that day or sometimes just nothing. Between that and being paid by the minute so I felt obligated to not take mini-breaks with timers on the tasks preventing me from just going to lunch mid-task I stopped logging in without another job lined up and unlike gig drivers at least I didn’t have meaningful expenses or an assignment system that de facto forced me to work set hours and take what was offered.
“However, what is gone is stability.”
No. What is gone is the ILLUSION OF stability.
Only a small portion of the culture had any stability–mostly middle-class white men. For women stability required a husband, which meant they often stayed in abusive relationships (it’s worth noting the amount of drug and alcohol use among women of this period). Homosexuals had to keep hidden or watch their live be destroyed. Lower-class and even lower-middle-class people routinely lost bits of anatomy in industrial accidents. And you could be outright killed, both in industrial accidents and lynchings and the like. Furloughs and firings and the like were also common.
There’s also things like company towns, where you had stability at the cost of autonomy. The company provided housing (of a sort) and “company stores”. They’d pay in scrip instead of actual money, meaning that people couldn’t escape. So technically not slavery, but mostly on a technicality.
This is my problem with the whole “We should go back to this era!” argument. It only makes sense if you ignore the lives of most people. ANY era looks good if you think you’ll be in the upper 10%. For 90% of the population, however, life was reasonably chaotic and brutal.
> You would have to search long and hard to find anyone in […] Southeast Asia, who thinks that their country was better off in say 1975 than it is now.
Put Indonesia as an counterexample of that, though as an exception to prove the rule; while many people still rightly regard Soeharto’s time as a time of repression and corruption, the failure of the compulsory History classes to exposit anything about early Indonesian history except cabinet seat numbers and year of reign– i mean presidency, has made a group of adults young enough to miss the New Order, in both sense of the term, and naively regard its blood-soaked industrialization and corrupt stability as something to be repeated wholesale, to the point that last election was won by an ex-New Order general.
It should be noted that the oil crisis and general economic crisis did heavily affect Africa too. Like in the 1960’s the vibe was that while there were problems things were generally getting better, but the 1970’s crisis lead to a wave of internal conflcits and general negative outcomes.
I feel like we shouldn’t conflate technological advancements and political crises too much when judging progress. While I’ve talked about breakup of local communities due to tech that’s a different thing than geopolitical forces leading to oil exports being throttled.
Oh, I was born in the ’90s and was optimistic about the global future overall until 2016 although admittedly as a kid in a family of computer scientists intending and expecting to be one myself so my thoughts on automation were that I wouldn’t be automated out of a job until we had coding AI that was better than humans at writing coding AI and very shortly after that everything would be automated and no one would have real jobs but that would be okay because we’d get everything done by robots for free. Never bought the timelines the AI people had, though, figured we’d need a long time to get chips powerful enough for a big datacenter to run a single human-level AI.
I had read enough history as a kid to see 2008 coming when I heard about ordinary people taking zero down loans to buy a house planning to quickly sell it for much more than the loan total and I figured that was stupid because “line go up” at that rate never lasts forever. But my dad lost his job in the dot com crash then went back to the company he’d left to form a startup so I figured “these things happen” and the crash would have been entirely resolved before I left college.
But the effects lingered in the economy much longer than anyone expected and it seemed to have broken something psychological in a way most crashes don’t. And the Fed crashed the interest rate all the way to zero then kept it there a long time because the market freaked out when they hinted it might rise a tenth of a percent, indicating the crisis wasn’t over. And Uber and Grubhub and a ton of other big tech companies whose names people curse now got so big off investors borrowing at almost no interest and thus willing to have them operate at a loss long-term to kill taxis.
And 2016 was when I really realized how bad the fallout was.
I was on board with many of your past critiques of video game mechanics (EU4 realist geopolitics, Imperator teleological political systems, AC Valhalla religious discourse, etc.) but this one fell flat for me. The big problem is that you haven’t articulated a way that HoI4 could *fix* the problem and still deliver the gaming experience it wants to deliver, which is very much a historical power fantasy about “winning” WW2 for one power or another, not a pure simulation game. “You just have a button”, yes, that’s how things normally work in games. The map is not the territory; details at 11. Complicated systems that degrade player agency in ways that aren’t central to the game experience are just a massive feel-bad in these games (think plague in base CK3, or trade in base EU4).
I also think you’re overstating the distance between the game’s model and how politics in WW2 operated, though. There’s a reason the “imperial presidency” in the US and the apparatus of the British welfare state both date from this era! Democracies did become more like command economies in mobilizing for total war. FDR and Churchill were good leaders who wanted and sought popular approval, but it’s not an extreme position to note they both had autocratic streaks going beyond what was normal for democracies at a time or what would be considered healthy today.
It occurs to me that it might have been a reasonable choice for HoI to abstract away the political layer entirely and cast the player as responsible for carrying out operations as, say, a Soviet-aligned USA or a democratic Germany. Plus something like the CK3 “stress” system to punish a player who doesn’t conduct the war in accordance with what their polity wants. I’m guessing that’s the fix this post is gesturing at, if anything.
Which is not unreasonable! But there is always going to be some kind of “seam” or “leaky abstraction” sitting between what the game focuses on modeling and the constraints of historical (or alt-historical) reality, and I’m not so convinced that HoI’s choice to present that seam as an overly-abstracted but still playable political layer is unreasonable.
Especially ironic since this is the only time when a US president got to have 4 period. God bless America with dying popular president (including Washington and Lincoln).
“The big problem is that you haven’t articulated a way that HoI4 could *fix* the problem and still deliver the gaming experience it wants to deliver….”
Does it need to be fixed?
Genuine question here. The idea you–and, to an extent, Bret–are assuming is that a game needs to be accurate to be useful and good. However, that’s not necessarily the case. You can learn a lot about history by looking at the errors in such a work. This sort of thing allows you to point out the assumptions and, consequently, the real-world counterparts in ways that would otherwise be very hard to sell to any audience not already heavily steeped in inter-War politics.
In evolutionary biology there’s a thing called Hardy-Weinburg Equilibrium. Given a suite of assumptions population genetics should behave in certain ways. It never does–never–but understanding how and why provide a great deal of insight into the population. H-W is WRONG, in that it over-simplifies genetics and does not reflect reality. But it’s wrong in ways that are useful and which provide insight into evolutionary biology that would otherwise be very difficult to tease out.
I also remember doing this exercise in my Roman Life class in college. We had to pick a film and write an essay on the errors of the film. I chose “Gladiator”. The film is very inaccurate, but the exercise of finding the inaccuracies was valuable to increasing my understanding of Roman society. Telling a person to write an essay on manumission isn’t going to convince many people to do it. Telling people “Watch a movie you already enjoy and write about the errors”–which, in the case of “Gladiator”, included how slaves were freed–is going to provide a better starting point.
There are of course dangers. Obviously some folks will read this sort of thing as actual truth, rather than a convenient fiction for the game that doesn’t reflect reality. That said, you’re not going to convince every film maker, writer, and game developer to get the equivalent of a PhD in every era of history they choose to examine. And sometimes that’s not a bad thing; sometimes the artist’s focus demands they ignore some significant parts of history. It’s better to learn how to manage this sort of thing and turn it to our advantage than to bemoan the fact that artists gonna art.
“FDR and Churchill were good leaders who wanted and sought popular approval….”
It’s worth pointing out that FDR in particular faced a lot of pushback. (Churchill was facing an existential crisis–Britain was preparing for an invasion, and we still don’t know the full extent of those preparations.) His attempts to manage the railroads, for example, weren’t as smooth as “Hit the Nationalize-Railroads button”. He tried, but had a lot of trouble and eventually had to get the railroads themselves on board to help out.
I’m not saying politics wasn’t more authoritarian during WWII. But democracies (well, representative republics) handled things differently than fascist countries. You have to gain broad popular support–and once you have it, the people in the industry will come to you with ideas on how to improve things, because they bought into the plan on a personal level.
I think in terms of how it influences worldviews (totally separate from whether it’s a fun game) HoI needs to be fixed because it’s a Paradox historical title. The whole motive for the Teaching Paradox series is that people (including me) view them as essentially a serious attempt at creating a plausible alt-history outside of some obvious joke or magic events you can often turn off and this isn’t an unreasonable view when you take into account that they have to release a game people actually understand well enough to play in under two decades (though I feel like CK3 has slipped here).
You’ll note Total War gets a similar treatment for its tactical battles and operations specifically in Total Generalship because it in fact is where a lot of people develop their general sense of how ancient battles went because they don’t generally read detailed battle narratives. So it’s a useful teaching tool to explain how real battles are different both in the past and now. Meanwhile the campaign economy and such is obviously a thin layer of mechanics to tie the tactical battles together than doesn’t intend to get into the weeds, so it just gets brought up in how army movement and starting battles doesn’t work that way and the occasional mention that in real life you can’t “doomstack” your whole army.
Agreed. It’s the “perils of verisimilitude” issue that Bret brought up a few years ago and, while maybe a bit overstated, it DOES very much exist. To put it simply, if something presents itself as “accurate” or “true” (and Paradox games very much do), it has to be judged against higher standards because people then tend to believe it IS accurate even where / when it isn’t.
And I say this as a TW fanboy with a long history of being annoyed at Bret’s (more often than not overly) critical view of TW games…but he DOES have a point that games (and, broadly speaking, all works of art) like this tend to create misconceptions that are much harder to root out than the stuff you’d see in games like Age of Empires.
I mostly agree, and certainly think it would be a benefit to make improvements in the next game.
That said, from a purely pedagogical standpoint, there is value in something that is both fairly popular and has specific and interesting errors. Like I said, a lot of advances in our understanding of the universe have come from attempts to disprove things we knew were wrong but couldn’t prove were wrong.
It probably would be better for these errors to not occur. But since they do, they can be used to educate people if handled carefully.
Replying to @Dinwar:
“That said, from a purely pedagogical standpoint, there is value in something that is both fairly popular and has specific and interesting errors.”
I absolutely agree, and that is actually my main beef with Bret’s criticisms of Total War games. Beyond just “learning from errors”, you actually do need to balance accuracy and approachability, and for all their faults and errors, I’d bet that TW has made more people interested in history than actual historians. It would indeed be better if the world didn’t work this way, but it does. And it’s far better to have people interested in a topic and then fix their misconceptions – which, as you say, can also present an interesting pedagogic challenge rather than just a frustrating one – than people just simply not being interested at all.
I think you’re misreading the tone of those articles; he loves the series but since it is the way a lot of people get interested in the subject pointing out the way gameplay compromises distort how it worked historically is valuable. So Total Generalship is a matter of “Total War is a fantastically fun game, but here’s how being an ancient general actually worked with the stuff CA cut because it would make the game less fun”.
Paradox is coming in for harsher criticism because it’s billing its games as more simulators than a history-themed tactical battle arcade game.
And other games that get articles are also making some form of implicit or explicit claim to accuracy and are incorrect in a way that gives people the wrong impression. Same with other media. And with Nazgul and GoT dragons he just said “giant flying monsters aren’t real so I have no professional insight into them” and moved on to the parts close enough to reality to critique. With an aside about how strong trolls should actually be mainly to make a point about how good Gondorian armor ought to be.
@Guy:
“I think you’re misreading the tone of those articles; he loves the series but since it is the way a lot of people get interested in the subject pointing out the way gameplay compromises distort how it worked historically is valuable.”
That’s possible. I have to say, I never got the impression that there was much love, and here and there I even had a feeling he was massively nitpicking or even outright misrepresenting the facts. I would like to note though that I was mostly thinking about older articles as well as the occassional drive-by shot. I found the Total Generalship quite fine and throroughly enjoyable. And I do get the “I’m a fan but at the same time annoyed with inaccurracies” approach, back in the good old days I used to be one of the most vocal folks on TWCenter to bitch and moan about basically everything the games did wrong, while simultaneously sinking hundreds of hours into playing them xD
And yes, I’d very much expect harsher criticism for Paradox games because they do invoke the historical accuracy much more.
You have to read him elsewhere to see his love for the series, mostly. I’m pretty sure he has thousands of hours in TWW based on his gameplay comments. But this is a history blog and his position is that whether a game is fun is off-topic here so Total War gets critiqued for inaccuracy in part because it is unusually realistic which gives the subconcious sense it’s entirely realistic and then it has an Egypt lineup in Rome 1 that’s like a thousand years out of date for the period. And I think all of the tactical command comments are meant in the same sense as Total Generalship.
“That said, you’re not going to convince every film maker, writer, and game developer to get the equivalent of a PhD in every era of history they choose to examine.” I know that it not your point, but I think it worth pointing out they do not have do it themselves they can a hire a historian. Particularly considering the film bugets that should not be too hard to imagine and historians are not too well paid.
Hiring an expert and listening to them are two different things. It’s one reason why “Jurassic Park”–the original–was such a success: They hired Jack Horner and actually listened to him. In contrast, many movies and TV shows and things hire consultants in various areas but ignore what they have to say. And expertise doesn’t come cheap. If you’re going to spend over $100/hour on something and ignore it anyway, you may as well ignore it for free.
Sometimes, to be clear, that’s justifiable! Sometimes strict factual reproduction of something gets in the way of the story. Going back to “Jurassic Park”, had they put feathers on the dinosaurs everyone would think it was ridiculous. Now we would think it was accurate, but in the 90s few people would have accepted it. And there’s a thing particular to historical works where historic fact is often immersion-breaking. It would have been entirely appropriate for “Gladiator” to stop the combat to advertise for various things, for example. It’s also entirely accurate to have knights in shining armor shooting at people with pistols. But if you show these things on screen everyone will complain about the inaccuracy of it. So the expense could actually be detrimental to the final product.
All that said, I think there are enough times when accuracy adds to the film that in a relatively serious attempt to show the past, it’s worth it.
Not sure if you know this or not, but “knights in shining armor shooting at people (another knight, that is) with pistols” was literally the capstone of Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura trailer! And of course, that was there specifically to highlight that the setting is purportedly not like the real world – otherwise only really shown by the other unfortunate knight possessing a blue-glowing, presumably magic sword.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGKlGqvt8AQ
It’s quite a weird minute-long trailer, most of which is devoted to a couple of WWI-style biplanes downing an airship – though they are so bad at strafing that even though the airship appears totally unarmed and doesn’t even attempt to maneuver, both of them still end up crashing into it somehow. (After I first saw it, many years ago, I thought the pilots were orcs and it was meant to be a joke about their intelligence and/or near-sightedness – but unless I saw some extended version back then, the pilots’ identity isn’t shown.)
I was about to write that trailer was probably one of the reasons why the game sold badly and killed its creator, Troika (same people who created the original Fallout but then split off from that company, Interplay – which also went bankrupt quite quickly); however, it apparently sold pretty well by the standards of the time (4th place in the US – and the drop-off was mainly in the post-trailer weeks) – though not quite good enough to recoup the budget it had. (Even then, it was the commercial failure of the original Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines which delivered the killing blow.) Perhaps that trailer did appeal to a number of people after all!
P.S. Up until I double-checked, I misremembered that bit with the knight as happening in a Heroes of Annihilated Empires trailer instead – a 2006 Ukrainian strategy game which also had “a world of magic and technology” theme. (Based on those trailers and contemporary reviews, I think it was going for the semi-popular “the world which looks like fantasy is present-day Earth some centuries after a magical cataclysm” premise/plot twist; either way, I believe the story was left on a cliffhanger and never really resolved after underwhelming commercial performance.)
However, nope – for whatever reason, that game’s trailers were instead obsessed with a depiction of modern-looking fighter jets raining missiles (from visual range even though they are also shown to possess radars, because rule of cool, I guess) onto a floating island city. Like the airship in Arcanum trailer, that city also seemingly lacks anything to fight back with – yet the jets still seemingly fail to get the Mayan-style pyramid at its center, which was apparently the primary objective. (And manages to lift off and do some glowing magic explosion pulse at the end of multiple trailers.)
I think you touched on the solution; failure rates. If policies have nonzero failure rates, the political layer is immediately a lot more complex and memes a lot riskier.
And it sets up a simple buff for democracies that brings them into alignment with the historical reality; give democracies lower failure rates. Sure, dictators can dictate. And when that works it can be quick and decisive. But perhaps that messy process of debate and argument can find sometimes a better solution than any one “pure” perspective that entered into the process.
That’s the sort of process that gives you an M3 tank in time for North Africa and an M4 tank in time for Italy. America started behind the ball, and asked industry for (essentially) the M4 tank. Industry looked at the requirement and replied that they couldn’t make it in time, due to certain particular manufacturing capability gaps like the turret ring. Instead, the idea they came up with was to have a ‘good enough’ solution ready fast, quickly followed by the originally-requested world-beater. Hence the M3 with a 37mm gun in the turret and its distinctive already-anachronistic 75mm sponson gun.
And not only was the M3 ready in time for North Africa, and the M4 for Italy, but more than 80% of the 50k M4s produced survived the war, compared to a little more than 20% of the 64k T-34s and 3-6% of all German types (~50k).
Interestingly, the Soviets did similar things, as did the British. The UK did it through interlocking committees that considered industrial issues, military needs and urgency, and produced eg aircraft upgrades and mark replacements with remarkably little down-time. The Soviets allowed factories scope to alter designs based on field feedback, but also ran design competitions that led into production very rapidly. Germany oscillated between industry that pursued designs unchecked by wider needs and military insistence on rapid delivery that hampered production efficiency.
“100% of IS-3s survived the war!”
“Did IS-3 fight in any battles of the war?”
“No.*”
(An even sillier joke amongst some history enthusiasts: New Zealand’s Bob Semple is the ultimate tank, since it was never defeated by anyone or anything.)
Obviously, the Sherman did fight, but the fact is that it had entered the war later than your other examples, and so even setting aside the difference in the myriad factors that have nothing to do with tank design yet affect casualties a lot (i.e. the amount/extent of air superiority/supremacy Sherman normally operated under, as opposed to its counterparts), a correspondingly larger fraction of its output rolled off the factories too late to get into combat. (Especially considering that “factory -> tank platoon” pathway was longer for the US than just about any other country, for obvious reasons.)
Hence, I consider this a more relevant statistic: the Normandy landings->Doenitz’s surrender period lasted more-or-less exactly 11 months. This is when the Sherman had fought “in Europe” (setting aside USSR’s Lend-Lease models); and according to Steven Zaloga, 4,577 of them were destroyed (including 178 models retooled with 105mm guns to serve as artillery support, but feel free to exclude them); that is, about 13 and half every single day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Front_(World_War_II)
Now, while I would rather not compare figures that aren’t exactly alike; if we take your numbers for T-34, that means about 50,000 (probably less, since you said “little more than”, but let’s round it up) didn’t “survive the war”. Given that for T-34, the war began in June 1941, that’s the loss rate of around 35 a day. Yet over such a timescale, it’s very plausible that it includes an untold extent of technical losses (i.e. tanks that broke down/ran out of fuel and got abandoned during one of the many retreats of the first 1.5 years of the war for the USSR, and when the USSR reclaimed the area and found them again, months later, their condition deteriorated too much and repairing them was considered not worth it – a situation which virtually never would have happened for the US Army at the stage of the war Sherman was in) – we can only speculate on how many, which is why I would rather not to do it.
Either way, worth noting that either figure is way larger than what people today have to come expect from war. I.e. Oryx-confirmed losses of Russian tanks in Ukraine are (rightfully) considered shocking: yet, it’s taken them over 4 years to exceed this Zaloga figure for the number of Shermans lost in 11 months. (Obviously, the Shermans cost much, much less than the successive tanks, the US military had advanced over an incomparably greater area for those losses, etc., etc.) Given some absolute silliness I have seen on this blog of late, (i.e. a comparison of BMP-1 and Renault FT that vastly undersold 50 years of armoured vehicle development), I think this is a useful corrective. On the flip side; just the number of Shermans Lend-Leased to the USSR (4102; about 70 were lost in transit when the transports were sunk) is also not much smaller than those Oryx-confirmed tank casualties, which would also demonstrate quite a lot as far as the differences in production go.
*There’s a myth it was field-tested in Manchuria – but there’s no evidence of that, and the video I linked on T-34’s reliability notes at the end, the conditions the Red Army had to go through to cross into Manchuria were some of the toughest ones possible for tanks, so sending a borderline-prototype over there just so that it would most likely break down on the march would have been silly.
(Moreover, a similar “field test” took place just before Barbarossa, when a prototype KV-1 and two alternate heavy tank designs – one just called T-100 and the other named after Kirov, both with two turrets – were sent to fight in the Winter War for a day, and it had ultimately backfired. Even besides the unpleasantness with the Kirov tank, SMK**, this trial by combat had only proven what every other country figured out on a theoretical level already (the multi-turret designs were a dead end), and led to an inflated understanding of its readiness, causing the more typical reliability trials to be cut short.
**It drove over a mine disguised with a pile of boxes, busting a track – and the emergency attempt to tow it away at night with four whole T-28s instead just ended up “gifting” two of those to the Finns. Ironically, it was eventually recovered simply when the final offensives of the war pushed the Finns away from that crash site. It stayed untouched in all that time (besides rusting internally as snow fell into the hatches left open by the bailing crew) since there was nothing in Finnish inventory with the capacity to tow it.
It’s a problem that the public interprets the meme political system as having anything to do with reality. But I don’t think that is really Paradox’s goal here. How much realism is actually intended from a system that lets you install Wojtek the Bear as the restored Romanov sovereign of Poland? I would argue that the function of the focus system is actually to allow you to produce wild and ridiculous outcomes as part of the wrapper on your dueling army game.
As such, I think from the game perspective, we should focus on those problems with the system that actually impinge upon the operational simulation, which has been labeled as the core of the game. I would argue that most of those are economic issues: the way the bad political simulation affects the core gameplay badly mostly proceeds by causing bad economic simulation. The “democracy has no advantages” issue is caused largely by this fact–for example, the fact that economic needs are abstracted, there’s some portion of your population that is held out of the manpower pool and this takes care of your food and shelter needs, so there’s no penalty to targeting your army to the full size your manpower pool allows for.
A bit of a not-totally-related comment:
In the social realm of HoI mod culture, you sometimes see this concept of a fantasy-world that’s basically a hothouse for every single extremist ideology, in every direction — a world where the general desire for people to try to preserve peace and stability, to mostly support fairly moderate mainstream goverments or whoever is enforcing the laws, has simply been drawn away and any fringe position, no matter how crazy, has a viable path to hold sovereign power over some territory and expand militarily. This is particularly on display with The Fire Rises, a mod where everything kicks off in 2020.
As someone who supports a fringe ideology (monarchist / religious traditionalism) that doesn’t currently hold any sovereign power anywhere, I think the appeal of the fantasy-world is pretty obvious. But at the same time… The fantasy really can turn pretty grotesque, especially as it sometimes seems to suggest a world where nobody really has much of a problem with dying in a civil war that happens every week or where everybody is constantly ready to throw down over ideological disputes to the tune of millions of casualties.
As support of fridge ideology on other side of the spectrum I can actuully agree with this comment.
The “crazy awesome rule of cool” approach.
I don’t happen to support a fringe ideology, but as a fan of WH40K, I can DEFINITELY see the appeal. Hard to put into words what exactly appeals, but the appeal is definitely there.
As a 40k fan the appeal of catastrophic wars over small ideological differences is that I can pick up a Dawn of War game, select any faction, and have a story about why I’m fighting every other faction and sometimes my own. And the fact that everyone is evil means I can feel like a hero playing the Blood Ravens campaign but then not feel bad as Eliphas killing them.
And fundamentally that’s what the setting is for, so you can build an army you like and your friend can build any army they like, and you can make up a good story about why the Ultramarines are killing Imperial Fists easily.
Expect that’s the big appeal in the HoI mods too.
This is interesting to read and for the most part good, I do want to elaborate on one pedantic point:
Grand Strategy, /in wargames/, has nothing to do with Grand Strategy, the military concept (which I would argue is milotaku stuffing politics and nationbuilding into a box they feel they can safely manage). The ship on this sailed before you were born, with Diplomacy. You can see an overview here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_strategy_wargame
The games that paradox labels grand strategy games are the ones with set board states before you unpause. Axis and Allies always has 5 factories on the eastern seaboard, and America will always start with its 85% cg civilian factories in HoI4, or whatever it is (I do not actually remember the specifics of almost any board state sufficiently well, and you’ve played enough of these games that I doubt you need the specifics) There’s usually a small element of randomization in paradox games of things too irrelevant to model (most characters, by volume, are randomly generated in EU5, CK, or similar, even in flagged bookmarks), but the board state at large is overall fixed. Stellaris is a 4X precisely because it /doesn’t/ have a set board state, the galaxy is always generated freshly, even down to the exact contents of your starting solar system if you don’t pick Sol.
As far as steam tagging goes, ‘grand strategy’ ranges from this, to ‘normal strategy’ (Because as I’m sure you noticed in making this, people will tag any game where you must have two thoughts in sequence with each other ‘Strategy’, so you get CS:GO or Yugioh with the strategy tag) to ‘strategy for big brains’ (which is certainly how some paradox fans like to portray it). I would argue it makes sense to say ‘grand strategy game’ for either the tabletop-derived definition (Fixed board states, which therefore gets most Total War games along with most games that purport to show a historical situation) or a game where the nationbuilding, is, /after game start/ on a mechanical level, sufficiently complex and revolves around what we can summarize as ‘choosing what to be’. Few games reach this second metric by my reckoning, so we can ignore it since I’d just be yapping (though I do think the ones that are closer are also interesting to yap about), and stick to ‘games with a set board state on turn 1’, and a number of entries will instantly make far more sense. Paradox has popularized this definition (Without properly defining it), but they are actually sticking to it; you’ll notice Age of Wonders games under their purview aren’t games /they/ label as grand strategy either. Sure, most of these games don’t interact with grand strategy, but they interact with a prior definition (And I do not have the wherewithal to come up with a name for it or try to argue for it).
And of course, I’m not saying this isn’t an appropriate place to comment on the simplicity of the grand strategy; it matters that gamers are given what is a complex model that is hailed as more realistic, and is meme politics. Just clarifying that there’s a reason why the games that are labelled grand strategy by paradox are called that, and it has nothing to do with what is otherwise termed ‘grand strategy’.
Oh also to be fair the wargames have at points purported to engage in grand strategy. It’s also just, well, untrue to the best of my knowledge. Like, war isn’t optional in Axis and Allies. The wikipedia article just kinda lets it stand, and I realized I hadn’t addressed that. I would actually argue that notably, Victoria 3 /really/ doesn’t engage in grand strategy at all, wrt end states; unless you’re going REALLY memetic (EG The Unabomber) the desired end state is basically always liberalist capitalists or socialist, both of which are imperialist (Preferably with as few guns fired in the process as possible). In contrast, you’re often presented with some sort of Big Choice (EG Europe or America focus as Spain) in EU4/5. And this gets into why I left ‘engages with the concept of grand strategy’ as ‘I’ll yap if given an opportunity’, so that’s sufficient clarification.
Also this isn’t a dig at Victoria, it’s probably my second favorite paradox offering after AoW4. There’s quite a lot of Game attached with reaching those end states. But it seems relevant to say when commenting on grand strategy in games.
Personally I think the game definition is about full control of both civilian and military policy in a reasonably complex system.
And Victoria has an optimal end state but you can just decide not to go there without being weirdly memetic. It is the Industrial Revolution so economically you need to have laws that permit industry but I do Japan games where I try to have the Emperor hold power all game after the Meiji Restoration.
*holds up Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld like plucked chickens*
Behold! Grand Strategy!
Okay, a scale qualifier is also needed to fit it in that you command something describable as a “country” at least at the top end and have meaningful interactions with them.
Though Dwarf Fortress had plans for big interactions with other settlements, both trade and warfare. I dropped off not too long after the big 2012 rework because minecarts and the new military system were too hard for me to figure out so I don’t know how far this has progressed but if it’s complete I might tag it Colony Sim/Grand Strategy.
Thinking about it, maybe scale shouldn’t be auto-disqualifying and Rimworld should instead be struck on the basis that foreign interaction isn’t very complex with it being a simple relations bar that determines whether a faction is a trade partner or raid opponent, and the system means you can’t actually reduce raid frequency by interactions since the storyteller generates a raid then picks a faction and has insects and mechs to fall back on if no factions are suitable.
Scale is irrelevant. Dwarf Fortress should be struck because ‘has civilian and military control’ is already pretty close to the default of a strategy game; by that logic you might as well say that Starcraft 2 is a grand strategy game because hey, Raynor technically has some sort of civilians who listen to him in addition to the military the game’s actually about. In Dwarf Fortress, you’re always monarchist alcoholics that are an offshoot of a larger empire and count on it for support. All of your actual tools are available at the start except for offsite management, which turns on when you pass a population threshold. There’s no sense of choosing what you are, and thus, choosing which tools you have available to you. There is no ‘grand strategy’ here, nor is there a fixed board state. You are what you are at the outset, which I’ll get back to.
By contrast, Frostpunk doesn’t have a military (Because a military is a useless consideration for the situation you’re in.) It’s also more of a grand strategy game, because some tools are in fact unavailable until you choose a political focus, and the other tools will remain unavailable to you (This is also somewhat true of frostpunk 2, but less so than it imagined in the marketing materials). EU5 accomplishes this by having a tech tree so large it can’t reasonably be researched, EU4 via idea groups (And yes, many tags in both functionally do not have a grand strategy to interface with because there is only one real overarching plan they can reasonably follow – eg ‘don’t get colonized’ as a native american or similar.) Humankind doesn’t restrict broad tools but at least you choose what specials you have available to you in a given era, and while you might have a plan fundamentally you have to make that choice in the moment, and can be constrained by neighbors (Who might want to beat you up) and other players (who may have taken your favorite choice).
Whether or not you remain what you are at the outset is the closest thing that comes to defining grand strategy as grand strategy, in player facing terms, and whether or not the change is a _choice_. A tech tree doesn’t, IMO, suffice unless it’s like EU5’s; too large to realistically go through. Hearts of Iron at least actually makes you CHOOSE now; it’s not enough to be GB, is this going to be your unaligned game where you try to trounce the world? Later Civ games come closer to giving you more choices about this – interestingly, not where you’d expect them to be. It’s not actually in the governments in civ 6, it’s in the government annexes you build (Which are neutral to your chosen government). Those tend to really enable and strengthen new tools into being more or less central to a strategy (EG being able to rush soldiers for faith). Theoretically these choices should at least sometimes interface with on the ground conditions that are alterable rather than being a set build at the start (IME, most people go into these with a set idea they’re trying at the start.) Stellaris actually has drifted closer to grand strategy territory over time, incidentally. The addition of more traditions, with choices (Rather than the old choice of the traditions as more of a civ 5 extra tech tree) made it more like one. I would say it and civ 6 aren’t there, but they’re at least colorable.
Incidentally, ‘complexity’ is largely an excuse to cherry pick based on your favorites (as evidenced by fukken dwarf fortress). Complexity isn’t actually specifically relevant to the notion of grand strategy as grand strategy itself. Sure, it’s complicated, but so are water physics. Everything’s complex in the real world. Doesn’t mean much to game genre, even discounting the ‘fixed board state’ definition (Which to the best there is a definition, it really is that.)
Chess has a fixed board state and I’d argue it has a lot less in common with CK3 than Dwarf Fortress.
A fixed, _symmetrical_ board state. The asymmetry, theoretically, is relevant to the outcome of these. Which arguably could include at least some fairy chess variants.
Really, I don’t even know on what fucking planet you think Dwarf Fortress has anything to do with CK3. Colony sims are fundamentally single player fusions of management games and city builders (Before tag creep caused it to mean ‘a game with some sort of frontier element’) There is one (1) actor (You), and the game makes no claims otherwise. That actor remains the same the whole time, and to the extent new tools become available (Which is not the case in Dwarf Fortress) it’s almost always a tech tree. Even CK3 specifically more makes tools available based on changeable, somewhat mutually exclusive setups (First and foremost, your life path thinger). Heck IIRC Actual Dwarf Fortress integrated Therapist so in practical terms you don’t even individually manage dwarves all that much, and that’s the closest comparison point the two had. You couldn’t at least pick a paradox game where you don’t have a specific character you’re playing as? You know, the majority of them? Colony Sims almost never do that one (Maybe the ones that borrow Xianxia as their setting element? But I know Amazing Cultivation Simulator doesn’t)
I don’t actually think ‘fixed, asymmetrical board states’ helps that much in determining if I like it, no. Well, I say that, but I keep liking them, so maybe it does. It’s a legacy genre title and definition. It’s still the one that is most consistently applied one, and without it people tend to just devolve into ‘strategy for big brains’, exalting complexity (Which sure, I enjoy quite a bit) without consideration for the concept of ‘grand strategy’* (Dwarf Fortress. Good lord.) It is not a _good_ definition, I agree with that, but it is the one most consistently in use. And it’s far less insufferable than ‘strategy for big brains’.
I will admit, i propped up Dwarf Fortress (and Dwarffortresslike) as an bad faith quip against guy’s “full control of both civilian and military policy in a reasonably complex system” definition, hence my invocation of Diogenes’ Featherless Biped incident. Because yeah, however you’d define it, city builders are not grand strategy games in feel and experience and many other things, but both (and Starcraft 2, yes) do let you control civilian and military policy.
on my end, i do wonder if “Grand Stragegy” as a video game genre/label has become less about its mechanics, and more about its feel; not as in “this game makes you use more than 2% of your brain” but as in “it lets you experience being a ruler, having to juggle your citizen’s needs and other nations’ that may or may not currently stabbing you”.
Then again, this whole conversation kind of petitio principiiing if anyone not named Paradox Interactive should keep using that term in the first place. They used it because their games were ports _of_ grand strategy wargames, not because they’re advancing the term as a new genre (hence Stellaris’ lack of it). Other games mostly gets labeled as GS, not advertised as such (and sloppily indeed).
Well yeah but he defended it. That’s entirely on him. I’d actually say a city builder can at least interface with it – see the commentary on Frostpunk, and the mutual exclusivity of tools, based on what you’re (hypothetically) building the city around. The tools start similar, albeit not entirely so, but diverge as you get to the parts you’re in principle not supposed to use. But that’s still very much the outer edge; as a rule a city builder doesn’t really have you choose what you are in a way that could be said to relate to grand strategy, and they almost never interface with the war game definition.
I’d say that makes little sense as a definition of ‘grand strategy’ as a genre. It’s just ‘strategy’ when the civilians matter at all. That’s already what Civ is doing. Or any of its competitors. That just leads us to the same tag dilution that makes ‘colony sim’ (Theoretically, a smaller scale city builder where labor is much more precious and the characters have at least mild aspects of rpg progression, which is how dwarf fortress starts) just mean ‘there’s a frontier-ish deal’. For that matter it discards HoI4 and EU4 (which largely do not care one bit about the citizens.) I’d more just drop kick the phrase to start with, especially wrt games, starting with something new. There might be room to talk about strategy games with a heavy simulation component or similar, mind, but I’d start there rather than trying to shoehorn existing terminology into things it’s even worse with.
As for whether anyone but paradox needs it: Yes, actually, at the least for the legacy definition. Most total war games handily fall under it. Also they’re not exactly ports either. Axis and Allies is not exactly a prequel to HoI. But a lot of the core principles are there, so that makes sense. Outside of the legacy definition, at the least slitherine software makes games with a similar focus on the simulation as well as the strategy (Even if I quite strenuously disagree with almost every decision shadow empire makes that is not specifically focused on the logistics and tactics.)
Huh, perhaps you would be interested in commenting on this Age of Wonders sub-discussion in the previous thread?
https://acoup.blog/2026/09/18/teaching-paradox-hearts-of-iron-iv-part-ii-divisions-designers-and-doctrines/#comment-111316
I doubt you’ll enjoy it, but there it is.