This is the back half of the last part (I, II IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) of our series looking at the vision of history advanced by Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and one of the most popular strategy games on the market today.
In the front half of this part, we looked at how Hearts of Iron IV understands industry and production, the game’s economic model. On the one hand, the military production model is interestingly nuanced and complex and the decision to simplify the civilian half of the model, in light of the game’s focus, makes a fair bit of sense. On the other hand, the game stumbles quite badly in that it – mostly for reasons of balance (a desire to make Nazi Germany more likely to win than it was historically – constructs an economic world where discredited Nazi theories of economics which were quite decisively humiliated during the war itself are instead represented as right and true. HoI4‘s economic system (unintentionally) employs the tremendous persuasive power of simulation to create the appearance that the Nazis and fascists did make the trains run on time.
Industry is going to remain relevant in this part, where we’re going to talk about HoI4‘s conception of strategy and in particular strategic ends. Paradox games are deservedly famous for not featuring many explicit ‘win states’ and allowing the player to define victory. At the same time, different game systems still push players to think about ‘winning’ in different terms. To take an extreme example, few players are going to define a ‘victory condition’ to be something the game doesn’t even track or simulate.
Here again, HoI4 is a victim of its streamlining: it is mostly interesting in having World War II and profoundly uninterested in the implications of World War II. It exists, in many ways, in a world without strategic ends and the strategic ends it does track – military size and map painting, primarily – are, like so many of its other design choices, fundamentally the ‘victory markers’ that mattered most to the Axis powers and least to the Allies, especially the western allies. Hearts of Iron IV thus, in its careless streamlining adopts in its strategic ends – as with so many of its other systems – an unintentionally fascistic vision of history, one in which what really matters is purely military strength and the ability to dominate.
Finally, this being the conclusion, we’re going to ask what the implications for all of these choices across all four parts are. Hearts of Iron IV has a lot to recommend it – the operational simulator is very impressive – but also quite a few flaws. Most of all, viewing these flaws together, one cannot be surprised that this is a game with a serious Nazi problem. Of course any World War II game is going to attract that sort to some degree, but we can hardly be surprised if a game whose systems repeatedly, if unintentionally, adopt a fascist ideological position is going to have a particularly intense Nazi problem.
Hearts of Iron IV shows World War II as modern neo-Nazis like to pretend it was and so it is unsurprising that they are drawn to the game – albeit, we must note, alongside a great many players who are not ideological Nazis.
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In practice the game is basically over at this point. Massively expanding my core territory (although India is counted as non-core), gives me access to a lot more manpower and – as you can see – a huge number of effective factories, pushing me past even the United States in economic production. In terms of the war against the Axis, the outcome is, at this point, effectively decided – the question is not ‘if’ but ‘when.’
What Is It Good For?
We should begin by discussing strategic ends. Countries in the real world do not wage wars (usually) simply because they like bashing their tanks and airplanes together the way a small child plays with toys (or a large child plays with Hearts of Iron), countries typically have aims they hope to achieve in war. In particular, leaders typically have a desired end state, an image in their mind of what the world is supposed to look like if they achieve all of their objectives in war. Now, war is a tricky thing that tends to get out of hand, so countries often struggle to achieve these sorts of clear end-states, often ending up with something rather different than what they had planned, even when they win.
But these end-states sit at the heart of strategy because all strategic planning is meaningless if you have no conception of what you are even trying to do and so one would expect any strategy game to pay fairly close attention to strategic ends. So it is worth discussing the strategic aims of the major powers in World War II – what were they trying to achieve – and the degree to which Hearts of Iron IV is able to model those outcomes and the factors which led to them.
But first we should acknowledge that Hearts of Iron IV actually has explicit scoring. When a game ends, a ‘playthrough overview’ screen pops up, presenting a ranked list of countries, with an overall score which is a product of the size of their armies, their navies and air forces. In practice, the calculation is very odd as this is effectively another dead mechanic – the air score generally overwhelms every other component of the calculation and relative scoring often makes little sense. In the screenshot below, Imperial Japan – on the verge of surrender, with the home islands having been invaded – ranks above the United States, actively in the process of invading the home islands.
While factory counts are listed on this screen, from the tooltip information, they don’t seem to have any impact on actual score. As far as I can tell, the end-game score system has been like this essentially since the game launched and it is such an infrequently used feature that it has never really been updated. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning here.
The other explicit system are the achievements and Hearts of Iron IV, like many Paradox games, has a lot of achievements (293 at current count) the player can earn. That said, achievements can only be obtained playing on ‘ironman’ mode (a single save file, so the player cannot go back and undo bad choices) and it is pretty clear from the achievement stats that very few players ever play ‘vanilla’ Hearts of Iron IV on ironman. The most common achievements are joining a faction (19% of players), researching Construction V (17%) and having 1000 convoys (17%) all of which are practically guaranteed to happen in most playthroughs, suggesting the total percentage of players to ever meaningfully engage with ironman and the achievement system is sub-20%.
The existing roster of achievements splits into basically two categories: a number of achievements for utilizing basic game mechanics and then the bulk of achievements which are about achieving specific things (in most cases, alternate-history things) as specific countries. Notably, very few of these achievements resemble the actual historical strategic end-states that the major powers were trying to achieve. Instead, most of the country specific achievements are, frankly, memes: a funny title to go with an unlikely outcome that is interesting either because of how absurd it is (‘Thai Fighters: as Siam have 10 aces’) or because achieving it is a demonstration of skill in the system because of how difficult or unlikely it is (‘I Didn’t Hear No Bell: As democratic Czechoslovakia, lose the Sudetenland, then grant autonomy to Slovakia, then defeat Germany’). There is a subset of players that pursue these, but very few of them are related to the historic strategic ends of the major players in WWII.
Finally, of course, there is map-painting. After all, like all of Paradox’s grand strategy games, Hearts of Iron IV is played on a gigantic world map, so it makes sense for players, looking to demonstrate or compare their success at the game, look to see who has painted as much of the map their country’s color. It is the most immediately perceptible outcome of effective gameplay and so one many players focus on. But, as we’ll see, while seizing or holding territory was obviously an important aim of many countries during WWII, it wasn’t the ultimate aim – no one was simply running armies around to engage in ‘map painting,’ they had goals that went beyond lines on a map.
So what were they? And can HoI4‘s systems model them?
The delaying factor here is that even with logistics companies (which reduce supply weight), my armored fist (now an army made of an even mix of 13 mechanized divisions and 13 armored divisions) needs a lot of supplies to operate, which means that after each ‘push,’ I need to make sure the logistics are untangled before I can set up for the next one, at least if I want to proceed with minimal losses.
Aims of the Axis
Broadly speaking, the Axis powers went to war with variations on the same basic strategic principle: they wanted to seize territory in order to access sufficient resources to enable a kind of ‘national greatness’ but also – as we’ve discussed – economic self-sufficiency (‘autarky’). The goal was thus not just map-painting for map-painting’s sake, but specific programs of conquest designed to secure specific resources in order to create a specific kind of state – a fully internally self-sufficient empire, based on racial hierarchies in all three cases.
The Nazi version of this approach is often encapsulated into the Nazi slogan Lebensraum (‘living space’), but it is important to be clear here that Lebensraum was about resources as much as territory. Had Hitler been offered the entirety of Antarctica or the Sahara Desert, this would not have qualified as Lebensraum. Instead, Hitler’s aim was about securing not just physical space but resources – critically, farmland – for an expanding (racially defined) German Volk. To some modern ears, the idea that the emphasis here was often on farmland of all things may seem strange, but recall that the Allied blockade of Germany during the First World War had inflicted significant suffering and demonstrated Germany’s lack of agricultural self-sufficiency. Moreover, the Nazi ideal – remember, this is a reactionary ideology – placed a fair bit of stock in the ideal of the (‘racially pure’) German farming family as the bedrock of the Volk.
Consequently, Nazi designs were directed towards seizing huge swaths of Eastern European territory – mostly for farmland (but also other resources) – and mass murdering or enslaving the existing inhabitants in order to replace them with German settler-colonists. The basic ideological foundations of these plans reach back into the pre-WWI period, but find clear expression in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925), so they are very early components of Nazi ideology. Perhaps the clearest (and most horrifying) vision of this end is in Generalplan Ost (‘General Plan East’), crafted in 1940 and 1941 in preparation for the invasion of the Soviet Union but building on earlier thinking. This plan – of which the Hunger Plan already mentioned was a component – proposed murdering tens of millions of Eastern Europeans in order to facilitate a mass program of German colonial settlement.
Italian fascists had their own vision of ‘living space’ – Spazio vitale in Italian. It envisaged both a campaign of settler colonization over the ‘small space’ (piccolo spazio) at the core of this new empire and then resource extraction from the ‘large space’ (grande spazio) of imperial dependencies. Once again, resources – viable agricultural land, raw materials and so on – were of core importance in defining the extent of this ‘living space.’ As with the German conception of Lebensraum, fascist Italy sought to conquer a region large enough to sustain an imperial state without trade, by creating a system of ethnic subjugation and resource extraction.
Japan’s conception of its war aims were only modestly different, albeit complicated by the fact that whereas Germany and Italy had singular leaders with singular ideologies, Japan’s belligerence was driven by competing factions within its government. Thus, for instance, the ignition of major war with China in 1937 was not the product of the central Japanese government but the actions of elements of the Kwantung Army. That said, the Japanese government backed these sorts of actions so I am going to take a view here, as it were, that ‘the purpose of a system is what it does.’ Thus, even if Japanese actions ‘bubbled up’ from junior officers or resulted from competition between the IJN and the IJA, the fact that Imperial Japan backed and justified those actions make them state polity. Viewed in that light, combined with the (sometimes retroactive) justifications, Imperial Japanese state policy is quite clear and, again, only modestly different from the other Axis powers.
Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” – the euphemistic label Japan applied to its empire – was primarily focused on resource extraction rather than colonial settlement. The Japanese home islands were densely populated and – by the standards of the time – highly developed, but relatively resource poor. Rather than trade for these resources or resettle the Japanese population en masse outside of Japan itself, the Japanese aim was to construct an empire (composed substantially out of puppet occupation governments) where the conquered populace would serve as an expendable labor force for the extraction of raw materials for Japan’s industry and a captive market for the finished goods Japan produced. The main difference here is that whereas the Nazis imagined an empire almost entirely of colonial settlement with very little resource-extraction-overlordship and the Italian fascists imagined an empire split between the two, Imperial Japan’s aims were almost entirely for resource-extraction-overlordship, with very little colonial settlement.
In all three cases, these aims were fundamentally economic more than territorial. The end goal was not ‘buffer states’ or a return to some past territory (even Italian aims included territory never ruled even by the Romans, such as Ethiopia), but rather an empire whose brutal extraction could sustain a certain standard of living for the ruling racial class through the subjugation or murder of other racial classes.
Which then leads us to…
The Soviet Union has still not – and will not – join the war.
The Aims of the Allies
The western allies (Britain, the countries of its Commonwealth, France and the United States, inter alia), entered the war primarily as status quo powers, with stated war aims – the disarming of the Axis and the dismantling of their empires – which largely aimed to return the world to something like the pre-war status quo. That said the way the war turned out mattered greatly to these powers in ways worth discussing.
Britain and France both entered the war as the victors of WWI, leading global great powers and with large colonial empires. After the war’s end, both countries would strive, fight and eventually fail to retain those empires and to defend their great power status. In a very real sense, then, Britain and France, while winning the war, fundamentally lost a grip on their long-term strategic aims. For France, it isn’t hard to see why – they were occupied during the way and the process of dismantling their empire, only partially reversed by the war’s end, began while France, as an occupied country, could do little to stop it.
For the British Empire, despite winning the war and never being occupied, the war fundamentally, fatally weakened an empire that was already (as we noted last time) beginning to slip away in any case. Some of these causes were ideological and political: as in World War I, the Commonwealth states having done their bit felt a renewed sense of pride and increasingly independent feelings. This, as an aside, is one of the only things here HoI4 actually models: war participation by colonial states pushes them towards independence, so a United Kingdom that finds itself unable to win the war except by leaning heavily on its empire finds that empire slipping away even faster for the effort.
What is missing here are the economic causes: the United Kingdom, by the end of WWII was economically exhausted. Winning the war had required suppressing consumer demand and turning the economy over to military production which is a fundamentally unproductive kind of production in that no one can eat bombs. The United Kingdom had begun rationing food supplies and other basic necessities (clothing, soap, fuel, etc) in 1939 and kept rationing some essentials as late as 1954 as the economy struggled to recover. British economic weakness – currency weakness and reliance on fuel imports, among other things – created the leverage that the United States (in part) used to force the British to back down during the Suez Crisis (1956), the event which effectively marked the end of Britain and France’s status as great powers.
Meanwhile, understandably, a country still under rationing, recovering from the economic devastation of the war and absolutely exhausted by it, was equally unwilling to summon the will to spend even more money and even more lived in a likely doomed effort to maintain its overseas empire by force.
Of course the United States stands as a stark contrast: military spending during the war functioned as a massive economic stimulus, while at the same time the United States suppressed consumer demand via rationing (for a shorter time and far less harshly) during the war, leading to a lot of households ending the war with money in their pockets because there had been money to be made during the war but nothing to spend it on. The result, famously, when the war ended was the economic boom of the 1940s and 1950s, which provided the economic muscle for the United States to act as one of the world’s two Cold War-era superpowers.
There is, of course, an irony that the country that ended up at war’s end with the highest standard of living wasn’t the one that had conquered any territory for resources, but the United States, which owed its renewed prosperity to domestic, internal economic factors as well as a gleeful enthusiasm for one of the things the Axis powers hated: trade.
The Soviet Union’s war aims are a bit harder to parse, in part because some of the claimed aims (the USSR promised to create independent new countries in Eastern Europe) were disingenuous (the Soviet Union instead produced puppet-states, disciplined with military force) and because the Soviet Union spent some time, effectively, on both sides of the conflict. Initially, the USSR used the war, in 1939 and 1940, as an opportunity for territorial expansion into Romania, Poland, the Baltic states and Finland, with both an ideological objective (expanding the Soviet model of Communism) and a geo-strategic one (establishing ‘buffer states’ protecting the Soviet core). After the war, those same aims appeared with the Soviet creation of a network of satellite states built on the Soviet model (with the threat of the Red Army to maintain it) in what would become the Warsaw Pact, while at the same time combined with a desire (shared by the western allies) to limit Germany’s ability to upset the global order again.
This set of Soviet objectives are also one of the few Hearts of Iron IV can really model, as it is possible to create ideologically pliable satellite states in the peace conference system, although because the game ends in 1948 (and in practice runs out most of its content by 1945) these states mostly exist as trophies rather than actually doing anything. That said, it doesn’t really model them well; notionally this effort was also supposed to make believers in the Soviet system out of Eastern Europe but as we’ve discussed before the game’s political model is far too simplistic to really capture or simulate that kind of shift in political opinion or consciousness and by the time it would matter the game has lost interest in any event.
What you may note, however, is that for a lot of the countries involved – the USSR is a partial exception but only a partial one – the overall strategic end-states (both desired and achieved) end up as fundamentally economic in nature, revolving around the standard of living that the post-war order could provide and the consequent tolerance of the population for further spending on expensive foreign political programs (the British Empire, the Marshall Plan, the Warsaw Pact, NATO, etc.).
Can Hearts of Iron IV simulate these aims? Broadly speaking, no. I’ve noted the few exceptions, but generally no. It can simulate the map painting component, but the underlying economic realities that the map-painting (or lack thereof) are supposed to produce, it is almost entirely incapable of even simulating, much less representing to the player, much less presenting as an end-state. The actual strategic aims of the major powers in WWII largely fall completely outside of Hearts of Iron IV‘s vision of history, a striking failing for a grand strategy game which cannot model the grand strategies of any of the great powers of the 1940s.
At this point, the game is mostly an exercise in pointing and clicking – Axis armies are weak enough in most places (while my forces remain fully supplied, equipped and reinforced) that I can advance almost at will, even just pushing forward with my defensively-oriented infantry divisions.
Empty Shelves
The main problem here is that nearly all of these war aims historically fed back into economic questions: the availability of resources, of agricultural land (‘living space’), of a trade-based, prosperity-inclined global order, the existence or absence of rationing and consumer goods and overall standard of living. For Germany and Italy, these were combined by what we might bloodlessly term demographic goals – the mass murder and enslavement of tens of millions of people in order to enable a program of mass agricultural resettlement of their lands.
But Hearts of Iron IV‘s economic system doesn’t simulate any of this feedback, making it impossible for the game to even model these strategic priorities – I want to repeat that, the game cannot model the strategic priorities of countries like Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom or the United States – much less present them to players as potential strategic end-states.
A major part of the problem is the underdeveloped civilian industrial system. As noted last week, Hearts of Iron IV ‘taxes’ each country a certain percentage of its factories to produce civilian consumer goods, a percentage which decreases as a country increases its economic mobilization law, which reflects war-time rationing leading to less domestic consumption. Notably, however, these consumer goods factories both consume no resources (besides the coal that everything does) and produce nothing.
So on the one hand, there is no point to engaging in military expansion to secure the resources for any kind of domestic industry except armaments production, because no kind of industry except armaments production actually uses raw resources as the game models them. Armies do conquest and conquest feeds armies but neither of these ever feed back into anything else. In terms of raw factory counts, raw resources – except for coal – are entirely superfluous to industrial expansion. So long as building slots exist, any country can happily keep plopping down civilian factories and infrastructure and never really face any kind of resource shortage.
Meanwhile, HoI4 does not simulate standard of living or the civilian supply of goods at all. The contrast with Europa Universalis V or Victoria II or III – where goods production feeds back both into state revenues but also into the goods available for consumption by pops and thus into stability and politics – is marked. In HoI4‘s economic system, consumer goods usage is simply modeled as waste: it does not result in economic growth, it does not influence politics and there is no standard of living mechanic for it to influence.
Of course historically, rationing – which is how you actually reduce the ‘consumer goods’ percentage of industry – mattered a lot. It was politically contentious in the democracies both during the war and (for Britain) in the years following. In most countries, the demands of the war meant that most luxuries vanished from stores fairly early on, while in many countries – particularly the Axis powers and the Soviet Union – the war’s demands meant that necessities were rationed tighter and tighter, until things like calorie allotments for civilians were truly parlous. It matters, as a historical matter, that the outcome of a war that was supposed to guarantee prosperity and plenty to specific racial groups instead delivered them want and starvation.
Meanwhile the game is likewise incapable of modeling the post-war situation either. Apart from Germany’s unique MEFO bills, the game doesn’t simulate the ways in which countries fought the war by effectively borrowing from the future – either by direct debt financing or by suppressing consumer demand to focus entirely on military production. There is no way, for instance, for the United Kingdom to rack up lend lease debt or end up in a situation at the end of the war where the historical massive Anglo-American loan was required simply to keep the British economy running as it transitioned away from military production (which in turn would also require Marshall Plan assistance).
Instead, as discussed last time, Hearts of Iron IV‘s economic simulation features spiraling, out-of-control growth because it treats consumer goods as a kind of waste that is reduced by war economies, leading to economies becoming more productive rather than less as a result of mobilization (the opposite of the thing that happened). As a result, it has no way of simulating France and Britain being effectively bankrupted by the war, nor of simulating the United States’ unique position as the one major world economy that hadn’t been blasted into rubble. Instead, everyone finishes the war with vastly larger economies than when they started.
The only major exception to this rule is Germany’s MEFO bills. Historically, MEFO bills were an economic gimmick created by Hjalmar Schacht to allow Germany to run an enormous deficit without that deficit showing up on the government’s balance sheet thus enabling massive fiscal stimulus (via rearmament) without a visible exploding debt, though of course the whole thing about the MEFO bills is that they would have to come due eventually (these were 6-month bills, but you could ‘kite’ them for a time by issuing more), but Germany went to war, initiating rationing and a government controlled economy (and then collapsed) first.
The game models this interaction, with MEFO bills giving a quick injection of economic production and suppressing the consumer goods percentage, but with a nasty hangover down the line. However the game provides an a-historical ‘out’ – the start of the war enables the MEFO Bills national spirit to be transformed into ‘Economy of Conquest’ which then can be modified via ‘Autarky Achieved’ directly into Wirtschaftswunder (the term for the post-war economic recovery in Austria and West Germany) once Germany has seized enough raw industrial resources, which resolves the issue.
The major problem with this interaction, from a ‘vision of history’ perspective, is that it presents as if the Nazis could have permanently dodged the economic costs of their war if only they had won, which is almost certainly untrue. Historically, the Nazis looted aggressively across their new European empire and never got out ahead of the massive obligations the state was incurring doing all of the war – instead, even as the Nazis pushed deep into Russia, civilian supplies and rationing had to be aggressively cut back. It was not, in fact, possible for the Third Reich to conquer its way out of bad economic decisions and the fact that Hearts of Iron IV creates an entire focus and event chain to pretend that it was is another way that it ends up – for game balance reasons (Germany has to be able to win!) – endorsing a false and fascist view of history and economics.
Had the Soviet Union collapsed early in 1943, Nazi Germany would still had been burdened with internal debts it could not pay, store shelves it could not stock and people it could not feed, which is a big part of why it was planning to starve more than forty million of those people to death simply to make the math begin to work. I honestly find it a bit offensive that the game uses the historical term Wirtschaftswunder for the end-state here, because it implies that butchery and conquest – if it had worked – could have been a shortcut to the kind of prosperity that West Germany achieved in the 1950s, but the historical Wirtschaftswunder was based on sound currency (something the Nazis did not do), trade and economic integration (something the Nazis hated) and financial assistance from the United States (something the Nazis would never get). It feels like a piece of historical economic stolen valor, to be frank, to give the name of a historical thing accomplished with the opposite methods and ideology of the Nazis as the result of implementing Nazi economics fully.
However, beyond this industrial policy, the game cannot really model fascist economics either. Because of the already-discussed policy of indifference to Nazi war crimes, the game has no way of modeling Nazi efforts to create Lebensraum in the East or the possible effects this would have had. Nazi industrial policy is presented as a workable plan to use conquest as a short-cut to the kind of economy modern Germany has – highly industrialized, based heavily on trade – rather than an insane plan to attempt to murder their way to prosperity through a program of agricultural expansion that I think it is fair to say was doomed to failure no matter what happened. Homesteading was not going to be the winning economic model of the 1950s.
The result is a game that is incapable of modeling the actual war aims and strategic ends of the major combatants in World War II, despite being a grand strategy game about World War II.
Spain will be capitulated back out of the war by mid-July.
Will The Mods Save Us?
Before we can wrap this all up into a set of conclusions, we need to discuss the modding scene. Hearts of Iron IV is unusual as strategy games go because of the huge popularity of its mods, which range from small quality of life changes to massive total conversions which transport the game’s core structures into completely different settings. Something like two-thirds of Hearts of Iron IV players play with mods at least some of the time, though it is important to caveat that figure both that not every mod is a total conversion and also not every person running mods runs them all the time. Vanilla HoI4 is still the modal experience of HoI4, but the mod community is huge and a lot of players are running mods.
Can the mods fix Hearts of Iron IV? Kind of?
Most HoI4 mods are subscribed to through Steam’s Workshop feature, so we can get a decent view of the space here and I want to be clear that we’re really considering two separate things: the community of modders (who make the mods) and the community of mod-players. Here is, as I write this, the currently most subscribed mods on the workshop:
We have a few quality of life mods (Chinese localization, FPS Map, a peace conference system revision), a timeline expansion (The Road to 56), a mod that shifts the system earlier (The Great War) and later (Cold War Iron Curtain) and one alternate world total conversion (Old World Blues, set in the Fallout universe).
And then we have alternate-history What If Germany Won World War I? (Kaiserreich), and alternate-history What if Germany Won World War II? (The New Order) and Millenium Dawn, a modern day conversion to the game that got so popular with neo-Nazis that the creator – who is not a Nazi – had to burn down his own forums as the only way to get them out. Fully half of the top six mods for this game are ones that have – shall we say – unique appeal to Nazi-inclined gamers.
And that is the state of affairs, I must note, after Paradox Interactive actively purges the Workshop of openly Nazi mods.
Now, I want to be clear: is Kaiserreich a pro-Nazi mod? No, it is not. But in a crowded modding marketplace where most people only look at the titles, you would have to be a little daft not to recognize the bit of marketing work being done by a mod which overhauls basically the entire map calling itself Kaiserreich – and what it means for the community that this name was evidently the second best possible choice after “The Road to 56.”
Is The New Order a pro-Nazi mod? No, it is not; if anything it is more skeptical of the Nazi social, economic and political program than the base game, which is to say that it expresses any skepticism at all (and it does as does Kaiserreich). But do these mods have some obvious appeal to modern neo-Nazis? Yes, obviously. While it is the case that both Kaiserreich and TNO at this point have a ton of content for countries that are not Germany, it is also the case that they’re called Kaiserreich and The New Order: Last Days of Europe and that there are two alternate history ‘what if Germany won…’ mods in the top six mods (the 21st most popular, Thousand Week Reich, is also this). Before we get to any other country getting a focused alternate history, we also have to pass a mod named after the Nazi victory slogan (Endsieg; again, the mod is no more Nazi than Hearts of Iron but the appeal is obvious), to get to the first country-specific non-German overhaul, Pax Britannica (36th in popularity; ‘what if Britain but science fiction’), which has 12% of the subscribers that Kaiserreich does.
This is, I must stress, the situation with all the Nazi mods removed and their creators banned by Paradox as soon as they are noticed. In short, the Nazi problem in the Hearts of Iron IV modding scene is old and well-known.
I want to be clear here that I am not accusing the makers of these specific mods (as opposed to now-removed infamous Nazi mods like “Aryan Goddess” and “Deus Vult” (made by a guy calling himself TauronSS)) of being Nazis or fascists or friendly to Nazis or fascists. What I am pointing out is this is exactly the modding scene you would expect for a game that had a serious Nazi-bar problem, but also had the developers actively purging any openly pro-Nazi or pro-fascist modding content. You’d end up with the most popular stuff frequently being borderline material that isn’t pro-Nazi per-se but happens to focus on the elements that Nazi players want to focus on the most without breaching the modding rules.
If I may strain an analogy, if you walked into a store that sold key-chains with initials on them and realized looking at the shelf that they sell three times as many ‘SS’ keychains as any other letter combination, you would not rush to assume that it just so happens that everyone in town is named Simon Smith. You might even draw the conclusion that the store owner – despite not being named Simon Smith and professing that he didn’t like the Simon Smiths – nevertheless seemed a bit too comfortable making their keychains.
Of course real-world alternate history mods are not the only kind. As we’ve discussed, HoI4 has a remarkably good operational military model, one of the best out there. And there are any number of mods which take that operational model and transport it into a context where it is simply no longer expressing a theory of history at all – mods like Old World Blues (set in the Fallout universe) or Equestria at War (set, incredibly, in the My Little Pony universe). Those mods are really popular too (albeit generally not as much as the alt-history-Germany mods, make of that what you will), and there is certainly an argument that by transporting the game into an alternate world they ‘save’ the operational simulator by ditching the bad history it is freighted to in the base game.
What I think the mod scene signifies is the complex nature of the Hearts of Iron IV player-base. The joke I have heard is that the HoI4 player-base is effectively split three ways: one third are hardened Nazis, one third are History Dads and one third are purple-haired LGBTQ ultra-libs. I doubt those numbers are right, but it speaks to both the diversity of this player-base and also to its very awkward and quite visible Nazi problem. But I don’t think the modding community can ‘save’ Hearts of Iron IV, because it is simply a reflection of the game’s player-base.
This was notionally in preparation for a ’round 2′ against the USSR, however I ran into a snag here that has ended the playthrough: because the USSR didn’t actually enter the war (and the game doesn’t count the seizure of the Baltics or Eastern Poland as generating World Tension), I actually have no way of declaring war on the USSR to recover the rest of Poland (the ‘Embargo the Soviet Union’ and ‘Operation Unthinkable’ focuses are gated by the USSR producing meaningful World Tension).
Consequently, I’ve opted to end the run here, although if I could declare war on the USSR at this point I would have no problems winning, given the combined strength of the allies and my access to all of the resources and industry of central Europe.
Conclusions
The last time I am aware of that Paradox released who-plays-what-country statistics was in 2023. At that point, the top 10 played nations in the game were:
| Germany | 22% |
| Soviet Union | 12% |
| Nationalist China | 6% |
| Communist China | 6% |
| Italy | 4% |
| United States | 4% |
| Japan | 4% |
| France | 3% |
| The United Kingdom | 2% |
| Turkey | 2% |
And it just seems relevant in a game that is about a war between the Axis powers, the Soviet Union and the western allies, the western allies – the democracies in that war – have fewer players collectively (9%) than the two halves of the Chinese Civil War (12%) or the Soviet Union alone (12%), much less, of course, Germany. Indeed, more people are playing Germany than any given three other countries added together.
There’s a relic of the game’s development I find interesting: the game’s main theme, dating from the base game’s release in 2016, was the theme of the (western) Allies. The initial cover art features MacArthur in the center, with one commander each from Britain, Germany, Japan and the USSR. In short, at launch, the game attempted to present, in important ways, the Allies as the ‘main characters,’ a stance that made more sense at the beginning when the focus trees of the Allies were roughly as (un)developed as those of the Axis.
I do not think anyone looking at Hearts of Iron IV today has any problem correctly assessing that its ‘main character’ is Nazi Germany. Evidently the player-base knows.
And before I get a chorus of loud complaints in the comments, I want to be clear what I am saying here and what I am not saying. I am not saying that everyone who plays Hearts of Iron IV does so because they like Nazi Germany or the Axis more broadly. Instead, what we see in the community around this game is one in which the majority of players are what we may fairly call ‘anti-Nazis’ but that at the same time the game has attracted an unusually vocal, unusually large minority following of extremists, kept in check primarily by the fact that their voices are actively, continually suppressed in the Paradox forums, the Steam Workshop and related communities like r/hoi4.1
And that prompts a follow on question: why? One answer, of course, is simply that this is a World War II game and the Second World War is an obvious touchstone for Nazi-sympathizers. But certainly one does not get the immediate sense that all World War II games and media draw this kind of following.
I think in the process of working through Hearts of Iron IV‘s vision of history we come to a clearer answer: Hearts of Iron IV, often in the interest of streamlining and game balance, has blundered into offering a vision of history which is inaccurate in the specific ways that are likely to be flattering to pro-Nazi and pro-fascist players.
Whereas in practice, historians generally regard World War II as a contest between economic and political systems in which fascism proved inferior,2 HoI4 presents battlefield skill and operational art as the most important thing in war, exactly as the Axis powers thought. Whereas in practice, the war and the Cold War that followed it demonstrated the considerable advantages of liberal democracies and free market economies, HoI4 presents both democracy and market economics as liabilities, weak systems that are nothing but negatives, exactly as the Axis powers thought. Whereas historically, the Nazi economic plan of economic stabilization through conquest and mass murder had functionally no hope of success, in HoI4, it can work and even produce an economic miracle, exactly as the Axis powers thought.
In short, although the war itself demonstrated that Nazism, Italian fascism and Japanese militarism simply didn’t work as ideological, economic, political or cultural systems, Hearts of Iron IV instead posits a world in which they work exactly as their proponents – exactly as modern fascists – wish they did.
And of course, whereas historically the armies of the Axis, especially but not exclusively those of Nazi Germany, committed horrific atrocities wherever they went, Hearts of Iron IV functions as a ‘clean Wehrmacht simulator,’ reinforcing the post-war lie peddled by Nazi officers that presented the Wehrmacht as innocent of Nazi crimes (which were attributed all to the SS). That line, of course, plays into modern neo-Nazi minimization of Nazi crimes in a progression that has become blandly predictable in certain online spaces: they didn’t happen, or if they did happen the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht didn’t do them, or if they did they were good actually.
Put even more bluntly, Hearts of Iron IV has unintentionally created a simulator that presents World War II as modern fascists would like it to be. One suspects that at least some of the folks at Paradox are not wholly unaware of this – somewhat infamously the advertising for the major Germany update, Götterdämmerung, in 2024 veered more than a little uncomfortably towards Nazi propaganda.
Of course at the same time the shame of it is this game is built atop a truly remarkable operational simulator which does a really good job in expressing why operations in World War II took the form they did, shaped by terrain and logistics as much as by tanks and shells. And while the civilian industrial model is pretty flawed, the military industrial model is equally instructive in presenting some interesting trade-offs, even if it is forced to treat German and Japanese mistakes as if they were valid policies that could have succeeded in the long-run.
I do not think it is impossible to play Hearts of Iron IV responsibly. But I do think players need to go into this game forewarned and forearmed that the design and balance decisions made to make it an interesting strategy game also serve to skew the history it is presenting in very frustrating ways. And equally, I think the developers at Paradox need to give a lot more thought to how – if these balance choices are unavoidable for gameplay reasons – they can offer responsible historical framing to make clear to players what and how large the concessions to gameplay have been.
It might equally be worth asking, given where, very evidently, the development time and focus in the game have gone, why this is a game where the western allies – who emerged triumphant from the war and the Cold War that followed it – are less heavily played and have far less content than the Axis (or even really just Germany), who lost it.
But, for as much as I enjoy playing it (I have almost 600 hours in HoI4 and more than 300 in HoI3), Hearts of Iron IV is easily the most historically troublesome and flawed entry in Paradox’s catalog, a produce to be consumed with care because of how skewed its historical perspective is and how little effort there is to signal to the player the nature of that skew.
Instead, the game tilts unsteadily on the very edge of unintentional fascist propaganda, the sort of product that we do not teach…but find ourselves having to un-teach.
- I have seen relatively little in the way of systematic study of fascist and/or right-wing extremist views in the HoI4 player base, presumably in some part because the one company with the data to do such a study is Paradox Interactive and I imagine they have concluded that just about any result from that study would be bad for their business. But I cannot stress enough how anyone who has been in the HoI community, it is simply common knowledge that it has an unusually large contingent of extremists, even though they remain a minority of players.
- For a sense of this vision of the war in the scholarship, see R. Overy, Why the Allies Won (1995)
There are some intellectuals who
…are better at handling WordPress than me, and can finish their comments before posting them. Or figure out how to delete them when they err.
Trying again.
There are some intellectuals who talk about the pseudo-minds of organizations and markets. I’m the furthest thing from an expert on this sort of thing but I’ve heard people describe the overall market as an artificial intelligence that optimizes for capitalist ends. They say that there are ‘thoughts’ essentially encoded into the shape of the economy as a whole that guide the behaviour of those who try to make money within it.
Your description of how HoI has become very successful and uncomfortable fash-y over time made me think about that. It sounds as if any attempt to optimize a WWII game for sales is gonna push you in a Nazi-friendly direction. As if the market itself was a fascist.
Hey, my posts have been autocorrecting in the name of the pre Hitler Germans government to all sorts of unfortunate terms, you’re not alone.
There’s a complicated history here. One causal factor is that the less wrong blog, which was one of the foundational sites for the rationalist movement which spread early AI messaging through universities and businesses had a libertarian bent, arising from the biases and beliefs of Elizier Yudkowsky, a key figure in the movement. His non AI sci Fi writings often casually assumed a libertarian future with markets for things like drugs and sex alongside more emphermeral concepts like the decision making behind war and first contact being mentioned in passing, like a kind of amalgamation of popular opinion into policy recommendations and trade. He was explicitly non political but his post claiming that also spoke in favor of letting markets sell drugs even if a mother of four dies from an overdose, because it’s better overall for society than the war in drugs which kills more people.
(If he’s right is besides the point; that indicates the direction of his political position).
These ideas aren’t new, but that’s part of what led to AI bros hearing about them. Less wrong significantly influenced the space.
This naturally led to speculation that in the absence of AI markets themselves would act as profit maximizing engines. The alignment problem also influenced this, with some posters (including me under a different username) pointing out that in that framework markets are similar to misaligned AI, as they are optimizing something other than human happiness. Or whatever an aligned AI actually does. This actually suggests that capitalists should not be trusted with AI, as they participate in a misaligned system that should be expected to produce misalignment.
In part because the biases of space were pro corporation this often rapidly devolved into people saying that capitalist markets obviously optimized human happiness, look at the cold war, etc. and sometimes the discussion being nuked.
Because Elizier explicitly refused to alienate anyone politically (or so it goes) there was never any attempt to address these ideas by the early AI debaters and thinkers and synthesize anything like a conclusion to how capitalism interacts with alignment or resembles AI. Which is a shame because capital has eaten generative AI and all the spaces dedicated to AI safety are now idealogically toothless to do anything about it, or even meaningfully question the topic.
The idea still fits about in the background though.
All this to explain you aren’t crazy, that thought is a real thing that exists out there.
I’m very familiar with LessWrong, but wasn’t thinking about it in this context. Now that you mention it, the connection’s pretty obvious.
And viewed as an AI, yeah, the market is far from “aligned”.
How on Earth would this be an LW thing (or a markets thing). The concept of price signals serving an information-exchange function is bog-standard economic theory. It is an immediately following corollary that the part of putting information into the system is weighted by the money spent, so those with little money have little weight in it. It also follows that since it is often possible to extract money in a variety of ways that are bad for the functioning of the market, there are mechanisms where (to use this frame) “the market tells people to harm the market”.
Likewise, it is an utterly mainstream view that a central problem with autocracies of all kinds is that the government can ignore what the people want, whereas in democracies, voting throws information about the population’s desires into the face of politicians in a way they can’t ignore. The immediate corollary is that if some people can’t vote (e.g. grandma is allowed to, but forgot which day it was), their opinion is ignored. (Formally weighted voting was also a thing historically, see the Roman republic; less so today.) And the more complex corollary is that for various reasons, from “people are badly mistaken about how things work” to gerrymandering, the outputs that come out at the end of an electoral system aren’t consistently the options that would best deliver the things that people want (never mind their effect on what options are presented to be voted upon in the first place).
Yes, but most people don’t term the effect of market incentives as “Alignment”, nor relate these to AI.
That’s where the language and ideas of less wrong influence the way people think and talk about these concepts.
I’m not saying OP is right or coherent in how he views the market as being fundementally inclined to produce fascist propaganda like an AI, but he is right that there is a part of the AI space that talks like exactly like this. He didn’t invent it.
As for it being more obvious and mainstream to talk about similar effects in terms of price signals and electoral biases, I agree. I hope we don’t have to use the silicon valley cult language to talk about this stuff. But it does influence our society and it’s becoming more mainstream to talk about alignment, so it’s worth explaining what’s happening here to produce these seemingly insane references.
Well, AI went in five years from “not particularly interesting chatbot” to e.g. megacorps assigning mandatory training on it to every employee (as the one I work at has done). Of course people talk about it, realize they should extrapolate five more years into the future, boggle their minds, and look for ideas. The space around LW happens to have the best explanations on this topic, so their jargon is the one that spreads.
I hope people have the good sense to be able to distinguish separate ideas coming from the same source. It is kind of inevitable that unusual good ideas get picked up by people open to unusual ideas, who therefore tend to also have other unusual ideas. (Which makes them look like cultists.) And since nobody has perfect taste, they probably get some bad ideas among their good ideas.
If people find it more intuitive to talk about markets by borrowing the “alignment” terminology, IMO that’s a symptom of economics being insufficiently widely known. The borrowing is not complete nonsense, there is some shared mechanism, but markets are a very atypical edge case for this approach. Sort of like driving a nail with a wrench.
I mean, the less wrong people are, in my experience, largely cultists; last I checked they basically all fell for spiralism and most are now prone to anthropomorphize chatbot AI. They don’t have a great track record before that, what with multiple sex offenders involved in several sexual abuse scandals, which is a hallmark of cult isolation. Plus there’s the whole Zizian offshoot thing.
I have strong opinions here. I think I’ll leave it at that rather than vent further, it’s off topic.
Marte, AI was _already_ booming and hyping up way before OpenAI; even if we restrict outselves within the Generative Machine Learning/Neural Network subgroup, it was already toutet as edgecutter technology that’s a must-learn for information technologizers and their managers. And that’s before all the leaps-and-bounces advancements in other subfields and applications like audio processing, optical character recognision, Chinese keyboards etc.
Making it all about OpenAI and her imitators is, borrowing this post’s term, stolen valor if I’ll be frank.
The corporations-and-markets-as-AIs rhetoric predates ChatGPT, for what it’s worth.
And I’m not entirely convinced by it. It’s interesting but a bit too science-fictional to take entirely seriously. Thing is, our host’s description of how market incentives push Paradox towards apologia for the Nazis is very reminiscent of that stuff.
As for LessWrong, it has some cult-like qualities but I’m not as down on it as Terry. The main problem with high control groups is the high control, and LW is thankfully low-control. Offshoots like the Zizians can be very different, but the Zizians hate the mainline community and that’s no coincidence.
@BasilMarte
Likewise, it is an utterly mainstream view that a central problem with autocracies of all kinds is that the government can ignore what the people want,
I realize this wasn’t your point, but there’s also another question about whether “what the people want” is actually normatively good, from the point of view of other goods (long-term economic, social, environmental, cultural, whatever) that you might want to optimize.
It’s pretty clear that people “want”, generally speaking, cheap gasoline fuel, low taxes (other things being equal), high quantities of sugar in their diet, etc.- whether the state actually wants to give them those things, or whether it should, is a separate question.
It’s not anything about the market, but it is about storytelling.
It is unsurprising that the Western Allies are not popular. Their motivation is transparently reactive; “if it were up to them”, nothing of interest would happen. By contrast Germany, the USSR, Italy and Japan are the actors with initiative, the ones who want to change the international order at the start of the game. (I’m surprised Japan isn’t more popular.)
One obvious way to rescue the situation is to follow the standard arc of hero plots. Truncate the game to start after the Fall of France! (Sorry, France.) Then it becomes a protagonist story to try to change the situation in which the villain has half won.
I will also say that in general Paradox has leaned into promoting wildly ahistorical outcomes being possible, not just in HoI. For instance, in CK3 they’ve leaned into the memes about a certain Norse count, Haesteinn, with a strong starting event army (I do not remember him from my Viking history class but apparently he was a big deal in France at the time) going on wild adventures with a dedicated achievement (Fishing in China) for conquering China with him referencing a youtuber named koifish known for wild adventures with that guy. And in their promos for the recent Christianity DLC they made Ritual Cannibalism a main tenet of Catholicism, illustrating how easy it is.
My personal bugbear, since I’m a huge anime nerd and thus have adjacent interests in Japanese culture and history, is that it’s so easy for the Japanese imperial throne to leave the dynasty it often happens without player intervention. Long story, but basically the reason Japan has had a titular emperor from the same dynasty as far back as records go is that according to legend they’re patrilineal descendants from the major sun kami Amaterasu and this is considered pretty important.
I would generally say there’s two systemic factors which cause the market to act fascist friendly, although I’d not go as far as to say it’s inherently fascist.
Firstly, games that make people uncomfortable don’t sell (and also, game proposals that make executives uncomfortable don’t get funded), which makes depiction of historical atrocities difficult. See also Bret’s discussion about Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and how its decisions to make playing a Viking palatable results in uncomfortable implications.
Now there is a culturally contingent component to this in that what’s judged to be acceptable is not inherent to the nature of the market. Like that depicting people being burned to death is apparently more acceptable than showing a nipple is something that could be changed. But that uncomfortable topics make media harder to sell is systemic as long as we have a free market. The free market is squeamish, one might say.
Secondly, there is a large demand and apparently also a large desire to supply art that is about conflicts being resolved violently, and usually also through killing. I wouldn’t say this is inherent to the market but also historically contingent (although I’m not against people like Bret making an argument that it’s sort of inherent in human nature and culture because of it being the winning strategy for thousands of years).
Taken both of those things together, it’s no surprise that we arrive at a market which has lots of games about war that don’t depict war crimes with the severity they should. Which is fascist-friendly for certain, because “Let’s do a war because it’s manly” is part of Eco’s diagnosis of Ur-Fascism.
To give a bit of credit to the players of italy/germany/nationalist china/japan, in any historical game it can be more compelling (as an expression of your skill as a player) to reverse the verdict of history rather than reproduce it. ‘Winning’ as America in WWII happened without any help from a skilled ‘player’ so in some sense it’s a less impressive feat to execute (unless you’re doing one of the ‘meme’ paths as you did with this series).
That’s a valid argument, but I’d argue not the full picture. Because there is a matter of framing of what are interesting verdicts of history to put in front of the player to reverse. HOI IV heavily puts its thumbs on the scale by basically only giving you the mechanics of reversing “Who wins the war?”. If the game was set up and framed not as “WWII Simulator” but as “Post-WWI Politics Simulator” (as frankly a Paradox GSG should), then there’s many other events in history that could be presented as interesting and challenging to reverse: Avoiding the Great Depression, avoiding Decolonization, avoiding the collapse of the Weimar Republic and rise of Hitler, spreading Communism as a not self-destructive USSR, etc. But with its relentless focus on the operations of war and the reduction of everything else to Meme Politics, HOI IV does not give any of those other counterfactuals any space to actually be meaningful.
Then it would be more similar to Victoria 3. Hoi4 is less a “WWII Simulator” but rather a “operational art simulator”. WW2 must happen in Hoi4 so the player can produce tanks and order their divisions around – which is the main point of the game.
I think it’s important to note that sound currency here has almost nothing to do with what gold standard advocates term “sound money”, i.e. gold. Or crypto, because cryptocurrency and gold attract the same interest groups.
In context sound currency means that the Deutsche Mark (D-marks) introduced in 1948 were intentionally limited in distribution with only a 10% increase in supply allowed (10 billion issued, provisions allowing 11 billion). There was also some independence secured from government meddling with the supply, in that the finance admin who pulled this off did so via sidestepping the occupation government, de facto signalling they were an independent economic regulator like the federal reserve. It took a while for the Bundesbank to be formed as a truly independent organization, but these steps signalled financial independence.
And, most critically, Nazi era price controls were abolished, and wage controls were removed from central planning and delegated to labour union and trade representatives. You see the Nazis had formed a central committee to set what prices would be, which was both to encourage rationing and war production and depress or increase consumer good prices according to the whims of the party. They also set wages for basically all labor and, which should come as no surprise, cut them to the bone in a terrible deal to labour. German workers worked long hours for depression era wages, in part because the Nazi government openly collaborated with business leaders and this ensured their support, primarily because this increased war production.
The allies kept this system in place for a few years as they tried to settle things. This state of affairs had already produced a black market under the Nazis, which they punished with concentration camps when they felt like it, and without that punishment the black market took off.
The removal of both controls was critical. The end of price controls caused goods to become profitable on the open market, killing the black market. However in 1948 itself this did basically nothing because wage controls meant no one could buy shit; exports increased but domestic consumption didn’t fully increase. The continuing infusion of Marshall plan funds and the further abolishment of wage controls by the state in favor of unions negotiating with employers led to the beginning of the rebuilding in truth and the acceptance of the policy by the population.
(This wage system has proven fairly good at ensuring German workers aren’t overly exploited, but has had its own issues relating to how the state recognizes the unions and the potential for state interference in favor of businesses, so I caution against both over and under praise. Certainly better than Nazi central planning.)
Which makes the fact the game calls Nazi economic victory by the reconstruction name even more infuriating, as reconstruction was predicated on directly abolishing the Nazi central planning that the player just finished implementing, it’s as wrong as possible.
Just wanted to clarify because there were some gold bugs who showed up in the comments a while back when Alf Landon came up, and it’s worth pointing out that the miracle had nothing to do with “sound money” as used today except that there was a currency limit imposed by the regulator.
That was very interesting, thanks for adding that!
Yes, that’s a good point, when I say ‘sound money’ I do not mean the gold bug definition of the phrase, but rather sober economic management of a central currency. Basically, “do not do Weimar inflation.”
One of the surprises, for me, in Tooze’s “Wages of Destruction” is that the first third of the book is multiple cycles of “guys, the overvaluation of the Reichsmark is killing our economy, we might have to devalue it or even let it float” followed by “no, no, we need a strong currency, we’ll just create a new ReichsBitchKreis of petty bureaucrats and business leaders to ration foreign currency / control prices / make everyone stand on their heads, it’ll be fine.”
Which speaks to the enduring necessity of an independent central bank, if your economic system is using money at all. You need the people making decisions on money supply to be be able to make decisions that defy a lot of powerful domestic and foreign influences, based purely on what their economic mandate says.
This doesn’t really help if the entire bureaucracy is high on its own supply or if the economic situation is bad for reasons separate from monetary policy, but it helps avoid a lot of very obvious pitfalls.
I would posit that at least part of the reason the Western Allies are less popular is precisely because they won. Having the Western Allies win is boring because we already know that story – it’s in our history textbooks.
I must admit, I enjoy the alternative history of The New Order, primarily because I love to see the US (and it’s democratic alliance, the OFN) on the back foot, struggling against a Eurasia that has been consumed by darkness, and then being able to liberate the world and return democracy’s light. Because the US is the obvious underdog, and there’s more tension and uncertainty there.
I don’t want to defend Paradox, but I really do struggle to think of a way out of the bind that they are in.
Broadly speaking, we can take a good hard look at the various aspects of the game, and perhaps improve individual aspects. Truth is an antidote to sin after all, and so perhaps it is right to make the economics, the industry, and the demographics more simulationist in the vein of Victoria 3.
As it becomes clear that fascist economics are inferior, their ideologies are insane, and their actions relied on both luck, and poor decision making from Allies(which can be averted by players who know history) we might be able to get a version of the game which is more responsible with regards to how it treats history.
Unfortunately I see two problems with that approach. The first is the possibility that it would make the game less fun. PDX monetary policy relies strongly on the continued flow of DLC for continuing revenue stream. The developers might be hesitant to let that dry up, for fear that it affects the bottom line. Something something hard to get a man to understand when his paycheck relies on his ignorance.
The other problem, which might be more insidious, is that it doesn’t make the game less fun. Games are meant to be a challenge. A gameplay design which leaves Germany as a brutal and unfun grindfest risks causing the game to lose it’s fans. A gameplay design which makes Germany harder but does not do so enough might ironically spark more interest.
Can a player successfully carry out the operations of the German war machine while dealing with the maluses inflicted by the genocide and ethnic cleansing? If we tightly integrate the effects of conquering land, stationing military to avoid uprising, and try to outrun the debts incurred by the war machine, how much of the player base will be intrigued simply by virtue of wanting the challenge to beat the odds?
To be clear, I find the idea that a subset of the player base would want to play such a modified Germany in order to brag about winning with the handicap of Germany’s ideological and strategic goals perverse in it’s own right.
Feel like the actual solution is to simply extend Victoria 3 by twenty years.
Or just having a “World War” game focused on 1900-1950. Part of me wants that, and the other part thinks the game would benefit from starting in ’38 just to reduce all the shenanigans that can happen in ’36-’37
Victoria III Is barely able to handle the Great War, actual maneuver will probably break it. I like V3 quite a bit, but it’s very much a game well made for the era it’s actually about, with some limitations on doing later things.
It’s funny that I think that Vic2 pulls it better solely by emergent gameplay. I remember realizing that I have to maintain front fucking manually then I started winning
The main conclusion I’ve come too over the course of this series is that the responsible thing for Paradox to have done would be to not make the game.
A strange game. The only winning move…
(Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
At last, it’s our turn to ask the game if she feels like the hero yet.
Pulling in some of the ideas I’ve floated in previous installments’ comments, Germany’s critical path to victory would be more “destabilize internal politics of foes” than economic or even military. If they fail to set off a French crisis of faith in their government, the German invasion fails pretty much immediately, any French player that avoids a right-wing coup can then slug it out. If they focus on Britain, but can’t lower British civilian morale to the point of a no-confidence vote, they’re unlikely to mount a successful landing, let alone conquest. If they focus on the USSR, they need massive propaganda to try to keep the US out of the war and Britain at bay.
And making them vulnerable to the same sorts of counter-play – Germany facing a revolt due to not looting enough to give their core civilian supporters enough luxury – gives them some new loss conditions that fashy players wouldn’t enjoy. A neo-nazi would consider a game where they fought well but were outmatched in the field by a better opponent to be their fault, should’ve ubermensched harder; a neo-nazi would consider a game where France actually fought back after losing Paris, stalled out their conquest, and then Berlin revolted because they tried to enforce rations too strict for a war they were supposedly “winning”, to be antifa propaganda and a reason to quit, go back to HOI4.
(And I suppose making a game centered around liberal economic principles is propaganda, but that’s just reality’s well-known liberal bias showing through.)
IMO, make HOI5 have enough economic depth to simulate the reasons why and the methods how the war was fought, make the Axis powers a de-facto Hard Mode, and relegate the historically-implausible weirdness to alternative start conditions rather than alternative win conditions, and most of the remaining issues solve themselves.
Reading this series has really solidified my belief that a historically plausible WWII strategy game and a Paradox-style GSG are mutually incompatible. The former requires a specific sequence of events to trigger a war that is comparable to the historical one, and the range of plausible national strategies and capabilities are highly constrained by the material and political conditions of the time. The latter emphasizes player agency and a sandbox style ability to do whatever you want with any nation over the scope of the game, best exemplified by HOI4’s mission tree system. That sandbox element directly pushes against the historical plausibility, as it does in all Paradox games, but in Hearts of Iron the dissonance is heightened by the short timeframe and the extent of our knowledge about the historical period. It’s hard to play as the “spirit of the nation” of Germany when that spirit from 1936-1945 was the spirit of Adolf Hitler (and would be even if he’d been assassinated).
I’ve never moved on from HOI3 to 4, at first because I was waiting for the wargame mechanics to improve. But over time the focus on the wacky and overpowered alt-history mission trees really turned me off the whole thing. Hearts of Iron is for playing around with World War 2. If I want a mix and match nation and ideology sandbox with a side of World War game Victoria 2 lets me do so without having my suspension of disbelief smashed by a lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. HOI3 has its issues, many of which are the same as those Bret’s detailed in this series, but its more constrained sandbox and focus on lower level tactical movements helps keep the cognitive dissonance more manageable. After reading this series I doubt I’ll ever move on.
HOI4 started the trend of Paradox games becoming more “frictionless” and letting the player do anything easily, at the cost of both historic plausibility, and as Bret so excellently details, promoting an authoritarian and wrong view of history. States were not these omnipotent Nietzschean entities that merely had to exert their will and direct the nation to their liking. Reality has always and will always harshly constrain any single entity’s attempts to exert control over history. Things like CK3’s eugenics or “pick and choose your religion” mechanics, or Vicy3’s implausibly easy state-directed industrialization just feel too frictionless, too unrealistic to me. A good grand strategy game should let you try to do some crazy stuff, but the harder you push reality the harder it should push back. HOI4 just doesn’t have that push back, both in terms of its material mechanics, or in representing how inflexible, self-destructive, and ugly the ideologies driving the nations of this era were.
I’m inclined to agree with the immediate conclusion. World War II is too contingent on outcomes we weren’t guaranteed to face, it plays exceptionally poorly with paradox games’ focus on simulation. But the claims on prior games just seems difficult to countenance, at least wrt Victoria. Sure, you industrialize more easily, but politics is significantly harder, literacy is less insane (ottoman nobility had 10% literacy in V2, my beloathed…) and like yeah you have council republic and the unabomber, but it’s Victoria. V2 has bespoke communist flags for every country. You only see any of this shit if you try, you just weren’t cognizant of people trying for whatever reason. And they were trying, because those communist flags are a hoot (also Victoria 2 is barely a game with an lfcap economy, and last I checked the simulation breaks down in 1870. The simulation breaks a lot less in v3, which is saying a lot. I did like inventions tho, that was a neat idea.)
Edit suggstion: “and it does as does Kaiserreich”. Should that be “as does Kaiserreich”.
To add my own two cents, every time I have tried to play as one of the Western Allies (which granted has been a while, I play HOI only intermittently and vanilla HOI even more rarely), I have simply been bored. There is something FUN about playing a map painter, which unfortunately pulls towards the axis.
When I was a teenager I used to play Battle Cry, a U.S. Civil War game, with my friend, who was an expert at it. (He grew up to be an Air Force officer.) For the sake of the game, it made the North and South equal in resources including railroads, when the North obviously had most of the advantages.
I notice that whereas Brett says, “[H]istorians generally regard World War II as a contest . . . in which fascism proved inferior,” he doesn’t claim (because it would be false) that “historians generally” believe in the “considerable advantages of liberal democracies and free market economies.”
I’m also curious (I haven’t played the game), does the game accurately model the behavior of the Red Army? Historians generally have a tendency to excuse and conceal that, including Adam Tooze, although to be fair he was more critical of the Red Army in the classroom than in his book.
If I understand the question, then outside of the purge, no. There’s no mass suppression of Eastern European partisans or tracking of civilian deaths as the red army advance, no reprisal killings, no wartime sexual violence, none of that. I think the only exception ever mentioned in any hoi was the rape of nanking. There’s similarly no mention of the sexual violence against Italian civilians by allied troops either, or any of the similar crimes during or after the battle of Okinawa.
Of course that’s basically a drop in the bucket compared to the complete lack of mention for the Holocaust and other axis atrocities, which is a much bigger absence as it represented strategic policy.
In general the games system for modeling any form of occupation is whitewashed and exceedingly weak.
I’m guessing that by “the behavior of the Red Army” you mean towards civilians, and it does not. It doesn’t model the behavior towards civilians of any army, really, because civilians are hidden behind so many layers of abstraction that they effectively cease to exist. For example, to train new divisions you require manpower, which is generated by the provinces you hold. Each province has a population number, and a percentage of it is added to your available manpower on a regular basis based on things like your conscription and occupation laws (i.e. you don’t get as many recruits from your colonies as from your homeland).
Now, here’s the thing, that population number? Nothing can make it go down. Not invasion, not bombing, not even getting hit by a thermonuclear bomb. Oh, nuking a province gives it a -70% Manpower Generation malus (or something along those lines) for a while, but once that effect runs out the population is effectively the same as before.
If you go strictly by the text of the game you can fight and win WWII, and WWIII if you feel like it, without ever harming a single civilian.
That’s baffling! What a bizarre choice for a game based on an era of total war and unprecedented civilian casualties!
Well, it’s because the population number doesn’t represent the number of civilians in the territory, it’s an abstraction showing an ideal population. So a -70% manpower generation malus represents the deaths of ~70 of the population number; from the distant perspective of the player, those deaths are temporary as unmodeled population movements and birthrate changes will eventually fill in the difference. Nearly every named number in any Paradox game is an abstraction of multiple factors, and consequently most of their names for numbers are misnomers.
As some one who has played more Kaiserreich than base HOI4 I feel the need to defend it a bit. Especially, in the last couple of updates has gone out of its way to highlight that the more right wing authoritarian paths are bad outcomes and highly unlikely to work in the long run. Savinkov’s path for Russia ends with an event showing him to a depressed drunk loser who started 2 World Wars out of his own egomania and delusions of grandeur and who’s empire is going to wither away due to corruption and neglect. For Germany by far the best outcome narratively is shown to be the SPD’s path where Germany transitions to full a British style constitutional monarchy, while Schleicher’s authoritarian militarist path alludes to the fact that even right after the end of the war corruption and mismanagement are already seeping into the foundations of the German state, and heavily implies that Germany will waste its victory trying to cling onto its empire in Africa to the bitter end.
For criticism, I will say the depiction of the more democratic paths of the French Exiles (socialist revolutions broke out in both the UK and France after WW1 and their governments fled to the colonies) is not great and kind of tries to side step that they’re running a white supremacist regime over large parts of Africa while conscripting Africans to die in their reconquest of the French Mainland, and they can also fully integrate and core all their colonies afterwards, which is highly unrealistic to say the least. Japan also doesn’t show Democracy to be any different that their militarist paths, but that’s in large part because Japan’s content is ancient. Finally, there’s Mustafa Kemal’s path for the Ottoman Empire, which is very progressive and secular, but is also be pretty authoritarian given his goal is basically dragging the entire Middle East kicking and screaming into being more like the Western World.
They’re updating both France and Britain soon so we’ll see how they depict those regimes, especially since in Kaisserreich’s world Syndicalism is the dominant socialist ideology rather than Marxist-Leninism.
I’ve never played it, but from what I’ve heard it should also be noted that it’s called Kaisererich to signify it’s not about Nazis because it’s a “What if Germany did better in WW1 and the Kaiser still ruled instead of being replaced by a democracy and then Nazis, but now alt-WW2 is coming around”, which is fertile ground for non-Nazi What Ifs, although I am sure it has a number of fans who play it as Germany taking whatever Nazi-adjacent path exists.
The closest to a Nazi path in Kaiserreich for Germany itself is Kurt von Schliecher’s path which does set up a heavily militarized and authoritarian corporatist state, but is way less genocidal than Nazi Germany. The closest though is a secret path for the United Baltic Duchy which requires the National Populists/Fascists to take over and then for Germany to lose WW2 and then the United Baltic Duchy alone to manage to defeat both Russia and the Third International to reconquer Germany. It’s absurdly hard to do without cheating because the UBD has so little manpower and industry you struggle to field even a full general’s worth of actual proper divisions. By the same token, if the UBD collapses and Socialist Latvia manages to conquer Russia somehow they can reform the USSR.
On a related note of defending Kaiserreich, I want to add on to object to this sentence in particular:
“[Y]ou would have to be a little daft not to recognize the bit of marketing work being done by a mod which overhauls basically the entire map calling itself Kaiserreich”
“Marketing work” is implying a level of intentionality to the idea that the devs of KR are appealing to Nazis via the name, one that I find borderline slanderous. Even including Bret’s prior sentence of explicitly denying that Kaiserreich is a Nazi mod, I still think this is a wildly irresponsible way of objecting to the mod’s name. Like, think about what “marketing work” means in this context. If you’re marketing a product, even a free mod, you are trying to entice people to, in this case, play the mod by making it appealing to them. Notice it is an act of doing– one *does* marketing, not have marketing done to them by circumstance. A product’s name is especially an intentional choice– like you can theoretically unintentionally name a product after a dogwhistle you weren’t aware of, but you still chose the name.
So when Bret says that “marketing work [was] done… calling itself Kaiserreich”, I can’t help but read it as “the name Kaiserreich, in specific, was chosen to appeal to the Nazis within the modding community”. Which, to me, is a really big claim that needs a lot more evidence than just the fact the mod is named after a colloquial term for the German Empire. The German Empire, a different government that predates the Nazis in which the Nazis had an ambivalent (although obviously more positive than the republican era) relationship towards. One whose existence within the context of the mod sidesteps the formation of the NSDAP entirely, and intentionally writes off most of its historical leadership to not even give the player the option to put them into power (Goering being the one major exception due to his family’s aristocratic background and role in administrating Africa being too much of a hole to write him off in the narrative, but they make sure to make him universally incompetent and doomed to fail in his job, and also he can’t leave the African colonies either).
Like, sure, call me a little daft, but I don’t think Kaiserreich, as a name, is a dogwhistle (Neo-Nazi appropiation of Imperial aesthetics does not change the fact the German Empire itself existed independently of the Nazis and can be used in fiction on its own independent merits), but even if for the sake of argument we assume it is, I sure as hell don’t think its an intentional dogwhistle. But saying that the name was “marketing work”, to me, is akin to saying that it was an intentional dogwhistle, and that’s why I as someone who spent a lot of time in the KR community take some extreme umbrage to this statement. I would not have spent the countless hours making my own fan content for Kaiserreich if for a second I thought the mod was intentionally trying to court Nazis in a wink wink sort of way. And I also say that as someone who had gotten booted off projects in the HOI4 modding community for calling out nazis when I see them, to the point where it influenced why my name says former. I am not trying to say the problem doesn’t exist writ large. It absolutely does. But “marketing work” is just… too far, imo.
As an addendum, after I shared this post with a friend (but before it was approved), they pointed out to me Goering was removed from the mod a while ago and I just somehow never noticed because I just don’t play the mod as much as I used to when I was more involved with the community. So even that caveat wasn’t necessary.
Goering is still in the mod, but he’s a minor member of the Reichstag who gets convicted and thrown out for corruption.
On an unrelated note I just wish there somehow can be a Kaiserreich in Vic3. HoI4 is really boring with all the clicking events and focus tree before the big war happens.
I love Millennium Dawn, it’s such a fantastic mod and way better than the vanilla game, and I had no idea it was so popular among neo-Nazi.
A bit of a sidenote, but as someone who started playing Paradox games during the Falalalalan era, its weird to me how Kaiserreich morphed, and I keep wondering what the original creator, Sarmatia1871 thinks of it.
It started in the olden days of HoI2 with a “what is Germany lost WWI but the RCW ended in a stalemate” mod, called All The Little Russias. Then it went into “what is Germany _won_ WWI, and that is why the RCW ended in a mutual loss”, with Russia still taking about 50% of the content.
And I have no idea anymore what the idea and ethos, if there is any, behind Kaiserreich is anymore in these days. As wacky as it is, Red Flood seems like a more coherent vision (“the Great War burned away all previous ideas and mores, let the cauldron of ideologies bubble and overflow”)
Modern Kaiserreich, has mainly focused on sanding down a lot of the zanier stuff and instead trying to create an overall more grounded scenario with a lot of historical research involved (the amount of niche Chinese political figures from the Interwar period who get an absurd amount of detail going into the nuances of their specific ideologies is absurd. Between all the various Chinese tags there’s at least a dozen different Kuomintang paths, and there’s also the Federalists, the Zhili Clique, and Fengtian.) They’ve also put a lot more focus on narrative, though not so much it becomes a visual novel like TNO, especially in the past couple of updates which focused on Germany, Eastern Europe, and Russia. There’s still some crazy stuff like the Second American Civil War which largely is still there because it’s an iconic part of the mod that’s been there since before HOI4 even released.
I think in my mind I merged Kaiserreich and Kaiserredux. When did this re-cohering of the KR vision take place? I stopped paying attention in approx 2021.
It was pretty soon after that, it was around the time of the China rework, and it really accelerated with the various Eastern European reworks. With the Germany Rework having been the big 1.0 release. Germany’s content now revolves around managing Black Monday and the economy, trying whichever political path you’re going from getting tossed out of office by their rivals with a mechanic for simulating Reichstag support as well as internal coalition tensions, and using diplomacy and spies to desperately try to delay WW2 while sending volunteers to intervene in proxy wars to try and shape a more favorable geopolitical situation.
Russia’s content is less complicated, but still gives more focus to things like trying to break German economic influence over Europe and depending on what path you’re going either keeping the military and populace from getting pissed off enough that they overthrow Savinkov, getting them pissed enough that they overthrow him but keeping the military content enough that they stop a socialist revolution from happening, or getting both of them so angry that military high command loses control over the army and the socialists retake power. Assuming the socialists don’t take over whether Russia restores the Republic or becomes a Constitutional Monarchy depends on whether Denikin or Wrangel is selected as the head of the Russian Army.
I might try it out again, thanks
“(the amount of niche Chinese political figures from the Interwar period who get an absurd amount of detail going into the nuances of their specific ideologies is absurd. Between all the various Chinese tags there’s at least a dozen different Kuomintang paths, and there’s also the Federalists, the Zhili Clique, and Fengtian.)”
Oh, interesting! This reminds me, I’ve been wondering for a while (at least since reading this https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2025/06/06/the-young-marshals-long-career/ ), did anyone in Chinese politics at the time other than the CCP and the KMT bother working out a half-way coherent ideology?
It depends, on what time period you were talking about. The Federalist movement wanted a more American style Federal system, and was mainly led by Sun Yat-Sen’s one time friend Chen Jiongming, but they have a following out during the 20s, Chen shells Sun’s house and causes Sun’s wife and fellow revolutionary Soong Ching-Ling to miscarry which sours their friendship to say the least. Sun and the KMT then beat the Federalists and Chen ends up dying of Typhoid in the early 30s.
Oh, thank you! Interesting!
If a young man plays hearts of iron two there are two possible outcomes. Either he can become a nazi or she can transition and become a communist.
Hey, I played it as a teenage boy and while I did transition my favorite political philosopher is John Stuart Mill.
By the terms of modern political discourse anyone who has a favorite political philosopher who isn’t Ayn Rand or a fascist/neonazi is a communist.
Sorry you had to find out this way. Was the same for me. 🙁
To comment on the actual meat: While there are many, many terrible design decisions in HoI4, I don’t think its unreasonable for it to be Germany-focused. Germany, historically, lost, so reversing that trend is an interesting challenge, while playing historically is not. Interesting anti-Germany gameplay requires, due to the 1936 start date, either an unrealistically buffed AI Germany, of the introcution of a 1941 start date for USSR/USA players.
I’m close to an aster-wearing social democrat in the old vein, but I play exclusively Germany, if I play unmodded HoI4 at all, simply because it has a lot more to do than any other nation. Which, yes, is the problematic design choice.
And now, I feel I will have to take a shower after typing this, but I have to defend TNO (and Thousand Week Reich).
I haven’t played TNO in a while, but back in the day, apart from being an interactive novel, it was explicity anti-authoriterian and anti-nazi. The insane SS state in Burgundy are the explicit BAD GUYS, who want a new, now nuclear genocide. Even if Himmler (?) does not succeed in this, in most games, Germany is destined to fail and collapse under its internal contradictions, being either a Francoist Spain analogue, or something more functional.
TWRs Germany likewise collapses.
Now, in both mods, managing and somehow reversing this collapse is the _interesting gameplay_ when playing Germany, but the text-as-written is not exactly pro-Nazi in either mod. Or at least it wasnt a few years ago. Nazi chuds might misinterpret that, but Nazi chuds would probably misinterprest the Dead Kennedys.
To focus on one small detail of the post for a moment, I think simulating the strategic aims of the major Western allies might be a bit difficult because the countries in question weren’t necessarily clear on those themselves. To use one concrete example, within the British War Coalition, Churchill and Attlee might well have had quite different war aims. Even the IJA and the IJN were probably closer to each other in their ideas about ultimate end goals.
Interestingly, there are currently mechanics in HOI4 (added in some DLC but I have no idea which one) for creating the sort of Italian or Japanese resource-extration focused empire OGH described. In a peace deal you can create puppet govts and force said puppets to hand you their resources, as well as the economic might of their civilian and military factories.
Just a little detail I thought worth mentioning. Another area where the game seems more interested in modeling the economic viewpoints and theories of fascist and militarist govts, instead of liberal democracies.
Iron delights have iron ends?
Out of curiosity, would there be any way to wrangle WordPress to provide a better overview of the *latest* comments at any given moment here?
Not that I know of. My workaround is to use my browser’s search function to look for the date and hour, like “October 30, 2026 at 6:” to go through the new posts one at a time. Of course, you will have to skip past the am comments when looking for the pm ones.
Thank you, that’s more or less what I sometimes do. Wondered if there was a better way
I just subscribe to comments on the posts and go through the emails one by one. Not sure how to subscribe while logged in, though; I had to log out and log back in on this post.
Also I’d like to be able to subscribe to comments on a post without commenting, but my experience on Wildbow’s web serials is that the default implementation of that button doesn’t work. So I feel compelled to find something to say about a post to watch the discussion and have missed some discussions when I couldn’t think of anything worth posting on it.
Side question
Sorry, error caused while logging in trying to figure out how to subscribe to comments; for future reference, does anyone know how to subscribe to comments on a post while logged into a wordpress account? I got the popup when I logged in on the above after having been unable to find it previously. Is it automatic going forwards?
Anyway, that is certainly a failure of modeling goals as compared to Victoria and CK.
Victoria 3 has its “score” as prestige, which goes up by being higher tier*, increasing GDP, being a leading producer of a good (variable by good in the ways you’d expect),a powerful army and especially navy, and various specific achievements and monuments, plus a share of your subject’s prestige, so basically you want to be an industrialized British Empire with vast direct or indirect colonial holdings. Having enough to put you at either x5 average or 75% of #1 (initially Britain by a mile) while being independent and a Recognized Power (a status much of Asia and Africa have to break into) makes you a Great Power with various mechanical effects. Strikes me as suitable for an industrial revolution nation to aspire to. Or if you want to pursue more modern sensibilities, your average Standard of Living and literacy rate are prominently displayed and have their own important mechanical effects.
CK2 didn’t have a mechanical impact of score but it summed up the piety and prestige of each ruler when they died and then told you which historical dynasty the game considers you to have done better than, so basically you want a succession of well-respected and/or godly rulers who have a ton of titles, do well in wars, go on Crusades, etc.
CK3 ditches having an official score but you do have a Level of Splendor reflecting the Renown your dynasty has achieved, with the main sources being Royal Court quality, total number of dynasty members up to a cap, and the highest title of every member of your dynasty who isn’t subordinate to other members of your dynasty, plus marriages to landed rulers. This has direct mechanical effects that grant every member of your dynasty prestige on birth and make them better marriage prospects, plus you can spend Renown to unlock dynasty-wide perks and for a couple other useful options like kicking a son out of inheritance in a reversible manner, very useful if you have multiple sons and one of them sucks. I actually think this isn’t a great score system since durably taking control of a reborn Roman Empire holding most of Europe with every kingdom-level subdivision held by your dynasty forever is worth less Renown than having three tiny Iberian kingdoms that got split among multiple heirs and can’t manage to reunify or expand, and I really don’t feel like the mechanical benefits are big enough to let my realm split or put forth effort to putting dynasty members on other thrones that aren’t then my vassals, but it’s got a clear goal of growing your dynasty and marrying among nobility to eventually establish a Hapsburg or Karling situation where your dynasty rules a bunch of independent kingdoms.
It also has some Major Decisions that serve as de facto run goals for me where they’re in a special section of the decisions tab and their requirements are visible way before you can take them. Stuff like restoring a unified Roman Empire (unlocks Dismantle the Greek/German pretenders CBs to unequivocally be the only Roman Emperor and has a special challenge mode available that’s sadly badly implemented), uniting the Slavs, having ten independent kings of your dynasty, making Japan transition from rule by burecrats to a proper Shogunate, making the Emperor of Japan the temporal ruler in practice, restoring China after it goes through a “Long United, Must Divide” situation with yourself as emperor**, etc. Frankly, CK3 is too easy and Paradox’s efforts to fix this have so far resulted in things that are still too easy but also annoying, so often I de facto call a game after achieving one of these, often in a single lifetime with a not-to-insane custom character.
*This is fixed for a nation “tag” with many nations having some sort of path to upgrading to a higher-tier tag, like going from Austria to Germany to potentially a Central Europe power
**mechanically China, Rome, United India, Dar Al Islam, (uniting Islam under your rule) Mongol Khans, and something Jerusalem based called the Kingdom of Heaven that I think is new are a super-emperor tier called hegemon who can have regular emperors as vassals. China also has a special government (neighboring China-influenced states can share some mechanics) that anyone who claims the Mandate of Heaven must use, although if you’re an invader you get a window in which it’s super-easy to impose rulers of your culture in an attempt to not get culturally assimilated entirely.
Typo watch:
“Thus, even if Japanese actions ‘bubbled up’ from junior officers or resulted from competition between the IJN and the IJA, the fact that Imperial Japan backed and justified those actions make them state polity.”
Last word should be “policy”. (Unless I’m very seriously misunderstanding the intended statement.)
Typo Hunt:
“even more money and even more lived in a likely doomed effort to maintain its overseas empire by force.”
ITYM “even more lives”
Reading this, it occurs to me that I don’t really have as good a grasp on Italy/Mussolini’s war aims as I do the other Axis powers. Probably because they did so terribly in fighting the war, Italy doesn’t get discussed as much. Are there any particularly recommended books for WWII focusing on Italy?
Assuming you don’t read Italian, focusing strictly on the war from the Italian pow, and in no particular order:
If you wish more specific suggestions please let me know.
Regarding your note 1, I agree it’s common knowledge on the internet that the game’s community has many extremists, but two of the posts you linked as examples have their own problems.
One, on r/SocialistGaming, devolves into a complaint about “rightist” over-representation in general and treats the absence of Marxist theory as a lack of “proper economic understanding”; the other is titled “Hoi4 community tab is full of alt right non-sense” while being an outright denial of North Korea’s problems (to put it politely) as illustrated by the well-known “night lights” satellite images.
Surely you could have found more neutral (or less “tankie”) forum examples.
going to reddit to learn about political topics (aside from purely academic subs like r/AskHistorian) is a bad idea anyway.
It was surreal to see those two listed here given the host’s politics and history with the very kind leftists he’s citing.
What are you referring to?
There’s also the fact that when the Soviet Union did enter the formal conflict in 1941, it basically spent the first three years in what was effectively “survival mode”, with the most Stalin doing about post-war aims was some half-hearted attempts to ask the British and Americans to recognize the Soviet borders acquired in the MR Pact (something they ultimately partly compromised on – recognizing the Soviet acquisition territories from Poland and Romania, but not the annexation of the Baltic States – but only once it became obvious the Soviets were gonna have that territory anyway in 1944). It isn’t until almost the end of 1943 – after the retaking of Eastern Ukraine and right around the Tehran Conference – that we see the Soviets start to seriously start thinking about longer term war goals with the Foreign Commissariat producing the first tentative proposals for how their influence is to be extended over what would eventually become the Warsaw Pact countries.
The Soviet Union entered the formal conflict in 1939, when they invaded Poland as allies of Nazi Germany. For the first two years of WW2 the Soviet Union wasn’t in “survival mode”, it was map painting in Poland, the Baltics, and Finland.
The Nazis were essentially a successful snowball. The invasion of France would not have been possible without Czech resources (lot of military industry and equipment!) and similarly Barbarossa without France. Their annexations also kept away an economic correction. This obviously means they spiral pretty quickly if stopped early, but the fundamental necessity of loot didn’t end.
People focus on the eastern occupation, but it was the western that funded Nazi Germany. France alone was over 40% of the total with the Germans averaging extracting close to half of French GDP. Now a lot of this was assets rather than a given year’s production, but the long-run result is the same. The French economy was spiraling and that level of extraction would soon be literally impossible. Similar for rest of Nazi-occupied Europe. An economic crisis for Germany would happen I expect in the 1950s if they managed to ‘win’, when depending on how much the Nazis can demobilize based on how vigorous a western cold war is and how sensible they are in their extraction policy. Whatever the USSR’s faults, its economic management of its sphere of influence was positively benevolent compared to the Nazis.
Incidentally even if the Nazis managed to defeat the USSR***, unless some agreement or informal cooling down happens they have an issue, which is they will be stuck in high gear for war economically. The USSR may have been paying more blood, but the Western Allies were demanding similar resources in economic terms even before D-Day.
***I think this is more plausible than people think. The USSR was on a fine line between victory and defeat spiral by 1943. It was a fragile triad* between military manpower, industry, and agriculture with very little spare manpower . The months around Kursk had the lowest recruitment of the entire Great Patriotic War. Both Stalingrad and Kursk were must-wins, though admittedly hard to see the Germans winning either in the historical setup.
The idea of the Germans winning quickly I am skeptical of, the gates of Moscow is very different then taking it. But a long war much more plausible (which is where a bit more German success in 1941-42 might decide it). The issue is realistically 1944 is when I would expect the USSR to truly disintegrate.** Which by then the Germans rapidly have a Western Ally problem in spades. The USSR ending up in 1939 borders with 10-20 million more dead is far more plausible than the Nazis actually winning the broader war.
*land-lease was not that important to the early parts of the Eastern Front people tend to see as key. However the contribution is much greater than I believe the USSR margin of error in this area was by 1943.
**In 1941 and 1942 there is significant reserves even if USSR does worse. While in 1943 you start with a huge army even if replacements fall short in quantity and quality.
Interestingly, Equestria At War did have a little bit of controversy over its depiction of southern Equestria during the Equestrian Civil War, given it was very clearly modeled after the Confederacy with the indigenous American coded Bison as their primary target for enslavement. I understand they completely overhauled the civil war content a few years ago so this is no longer the case, and it seems like they’ve been making a real effort with more recent additions to not just create lazy analogues of real historical regimes which I think is generally less fraught.
The Soviet Union in this playthrough
The Facists didn’t lose because their armies were insufficient, they lost because they kept on starting wars until they lost. If we don’t start wars we don’t have to lose.
The Chinese Civil War is so popular to play becuase it has such a clear endgame: Survive, and Unite China.
Also it’s a non-major with content. People here vastly over complicate the reasons people choose what to play. Germany is worse and I couldn’t make myself play it, but I’ve played plenty of historical villains with no problem. I don’t play timurids because I believe it’s moral, but because I think it’s interesting. I can see accepting Nazi germany for the same reason, on a base level (and the losers are inherently more interesting to play than the immediate winners).
So, how can we make a HOI5 that is both historically accurate and still balanced?
First, I would penalize German production and manpower due to the failure of Fascist economics.
Second, use the political system to allow Germany to become less fascist. When you trigger Operation Valkyrie you get a splash screen that says:
“Congratulations. You have purged the National Socialist Worker’s Party” and lists the benefits – more manpower, better economy, smaller garrisons in occupied territory, the chance that parts of the Soviet Union will switch sides, etc.
Historically the best way to improve Germany’s war fighting ability is to make them less fascist.
In the spirit of unmitigated pedantry, the following statement is incorrect:
The Soviet Union plus the two Chinas are 24%, beating Germany’s 22% by about the amount of players that choose ::checks notes:: the UK??
Indeed, and if you try to resolve it by combining the two Chinas, you make the problem worse.
I’m missing something here.
All right, military production and rationing economically bad. Got it.
Waitaminute. Military production and rationing is economically… good?
Why was military spending in the UK “fundamentally unproductive” but in the US it was “massive economic stimulus?”
Why did rationing in the US lead to “ending the war with money in their pockets because there had been money to be made during the war but nothing to spend it on,” but the rationing in the UK (which went on for longer) didn’t, and “the economy struggled to recover?”
There’s a distinction you’re trying to draw here, but I’m unable to tease it out.
Maybe Brett has his own perspective here, but my understanding of the Great Depression is that it was a demand-side problem; the crisis that proved Keynes right. Nothing was “wrong” with US production capability, but public society got in a loop of – “the stock market crashed” -> “the economy is bad” -> “I should save” -> “nobody is buying” -> “cut jobs” -> “the economy is bad” -> even less buying and even more contraction. The Keynesian answer was for government to step in an boost aggregate demand, which the war did, even if the product being purchased was worthless shells and explosives.
It’s the same argument people make today when they say that reckless debt-laden consumers are vital to the economy, and perhaps Vicky simulates that mechanism too in some way. I have no idea what the UK situation was, but to argue that this worked differently there, I would start by observing that there are also supply-side recessions. If you are the world’s leading industrial economy producing 10x what you consume, maybe you need to loosen up and let Keynes into your heart; whereas if you are actually producing less than you consume, a Keynesian approach might be just adding gasoline to a fire.
We also have to remember two things.
One is that the United States engaged in Lend Lease before they entered into WW2 proper, which did create domestic production as the USA was exporting weaponry and supplies where it was needed. The USA was also in the best middle ground compared to the other big two as the USSR had a lot of resources but little industry to use them while Great Britain was an industrial hub with limited domestic supply.
The other was that by this point the British Empire as a whole was a huge drag in expenditure to keep around (something that France was also struggling with), which made recovery for Great Britain harder as a whole.
Going to be honest; I think it’s the usual mental skip for Americans. Don’t admit that you absorbed all the money out of Allied Europe, and only started treating relations between them and yourself as allies when they’re on the verge of bankruptcy.
America got all the money to build piles of factories, and still have the factory at the end, which the civilian industrialists can then turn around and use to make product.
And refusing to forgive any loans (or any percentage thereof, or other easement), which is also the usual hypocrisy/irony for the USA, seeing how they started.
If I had to guess, I think what’s happening is that America’s problem was monetary, so pumping lots and lots of money into the economy helped. Britain’s problem was a fundamental lack of resources broadly construed, so more money wasn’t particularly helpful and instead the war drained their actual resources.
At this point, I believe that you cannot have a Hearts of Iron that’s more aware of the implications of the state endgoals and beliefs by focusing solely on World War Two.
There’s just too much that must matter for the player to have an informed idea of what truly happened in that timeframe that goes beyond the scope of just World War Two. De Gaulle once referred to the period between the World Wars as the Second Thirty Years War, and while that’s not completely accurate, it does give a picture of how much of what happened between 1939 and 1945 depended on everything that happened from 1914 onwards.
Now, I previously said that the scope of a potential Hearts of Iron V that was more responsible would be one that covered the full Twentieth Century, and while I still stand on the idea, I think the focus on a game like that should be away from the operations (though it can inherit a more refined system) and instead focus on ideology and beliefs as the core pillar of design.
One of the things that defines the Twentieth Century is that it was an era of clashes of ideologies: from the Victorian/Edwardian style monarchism, the US-promoted liberal democracy, the fascist reactionary movements, the rise of communism along with its various variants across the globe and, why not say it? The rise of Islamism as rejection of both Soviet communism, Usonian liberalism and the legacy of the New Imperialism era.
“Imperial Japan’s aims were almost entirely for resource-extraction-overlordship, with very little colonial settlement.”
I thought the Japanese did intent to resettle Manchuria with Japanese settlers?
From the whole series, it feels like a fundamental part of the problem is precisely that HoI is so narrowly focused on smashing armies together in operations. The economic balance underlying the war is just too one sided, there was no way for the Axis to reasonably win by lining up in a modern total industrial war and bulldozing their way through the Allies. But because that’s how HoI basically works, it has to put a finger on the scale in ways that basically all line up with the “pro-fascist” angles.
Something with a much deeper political model (on both the national and international levels) could be able to instead show some of why Britain and France aren’t doing mass rearmament as early as Germany does, why France is so brittle in 1940, etc. And looking forward, that would also let it show some of the more plausible ways that Germany might have been able to beat Britain, or Japan might have been able to beat the USA: not simply by smashing them in war, but by combining key successes on the battlefield with existing fault-lines in domestic politics such that continuing to fight was no longer politically feasible.
To be accurate, the Italian rail service made improvements to the rail beds and rolling stock between WW1 and WW2. It still featured single tunnels through its mountains. Thus, any delay could cause cascading delays.
Italian rail service was being interrupted by communist railway workers going on strike. The counter-strikes by the fascist railway workers significantly improved on-time performance. If the communists hadn’t caused problems, the fascists wouldn’t have anything to celebrate.
Why are you citing r/socialism and r/shitliberalssay as evidence HoI4’s community is right wing? I don’t know the former too well, though I suspect their definition of “rightist” includes liberals like you and me, but the latter are straight up tankies and I’m near certain would consider you to be a “rightist”, possibly even a fascist. Like, the post you linked to is literally mocking people for calling out North Korea for being an impoverished totalitarian shithole precisely because they’re a bunch of Juche loving tankies.
I think the answer to “why does HoI4 appeal to neo-Nazis more than other WW2-themed media” isn’t to be found in the game’s implicit validation of Nazi economic thinking or whatever – that’s reaching way too deep. I propose a simpler explanation:
HoI like all Paradox games is made for geeks. Normies can watch Band of Brothers or even Der Untergang, or play Call of Duty, but you have to be pretty geeky to enjoy figuring out the complexity of a Paradox game. Modern neo-Nazis – not the simple populist far right of “I hate brown people and woke liberals” which (unfortunately) has mass appeal, but the hard core who actually get off on the uniforms and symbols – are also very geeky and online, and thus overrepresented among the kind of people that will play a Paradox game in the first place. And of course they’ll flock to the one about WW2. There’s something deeply LARPy about extremist movements and especially fascism, that makes them more likely to appeal to geeks than to the average person.
It’s similar to the attraction of some fascists to Tolkien, which Bret has talked about elsewhere. A large part of the appeal of the fantasy and sci-fi genres is in the grandiose aesthetics, heroic quests, epic battles between mythical good and evil… which is also the appeal of fascist propaganda! Of course they’re going to draw partly the same crowd, however unfortunate we may find it.
We’re all geeks here so this may not be on everyone’s radar… we’re fish who don’t realise we’re in water.