Plagued /r/TNOmod and the Reddit HOI4 modding community - When a subreddit for a video game mod turns to utter insanity

[VariableOverflow]

im gonna settle on this for the brezhnev portrait. might need to remake khrushchev too.

HoI4 portraits tend to follow a specific way of placing the portrait according to ratios, like so:

Just an example I found online. Yours might look out of place when all other portraits presumably follow this.

 

[Corpun]

I have to wonder how many TNO devs were involved in the development of Vicky 3. Making a glorified button clicker game without any warfare out of a glorified map game seems like exactly the sort of thing that TNO devs would design.

"I never knew X idea existed."
People who get their political opinions from HOI4 are the most politically illiterate people out there, more so than even redditors (I know the crossover is huge). Like how retarded do you have to be to not understand these are already ideas that exist. I wouldn't feel half as much disdain for these people as I do if they would actually put some effort into their adopted ideologies and did some fucking research and read the original literature, instead of LARPing, watching shitty video essays, and fellating themselves to their utopian paradise.

Kaiserreich has irrevocably damaged the political landscape and if I see people running for office 15 years down the line claiming to be syndicalists and wanting to revive a literal deader-than-dead leftist ideology that never got past the 1910s, I might have to check out from society completely. I'm pretty sure it's been posted in this thread before, maybe not, but some retard actually joined the IWW or Democratic Socialists of America because of the CSA in Kaiserreich. The IWW hasn't been a serious organization since the 1940s at the latest, and the DSA are literal zoomer containment for the mainline Democratic Party.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with learning about these ideologies, but put some fucking work into it instead of these strawmanned caricatures in Kaiserreich, especially Syndicalism which is such a mess in Universe the devs have made literal blog posts explaining how exactly the UoB and Commune of France function to try and make these states not seem like dysfunctional shitholes, and instead paint them as fully democratic egalitarian states.

 

[manfred von manfred]

But I am confident that I and these redditors would probably have developed the same world view without HoI4, with the game only accelerating the process.

doubt it

 

[GoodWinSon]

I have to wonder how many TNO devs were involved in the development of Vicky 3. Making a glorified button clicker game without any warfare out of a glorified map game seems like exactly the sort of thing that TNO devs would design.

Pacifica is the only one I can name. Funnily enough, the last thing Pacifica was involved in before leaving was Tabby's After Midnight collapse.

After Midnight's gameplay exclusively involves... you guessed it, clicking buttons. AM is an encapsulation of everything wrong with TNO. It has the pretty gui, the countless tags, the flowery events, and of course, the zero gameplay. In fact, it has negative gameplay! It punishes you for playing an obscure and difficult to find path, and punishes the devs who now have to take this collapse into account for future content! (That is, if the Last Days devs ever made content past 1972 which is unlikely at this point.)

The last few events that fire are a joke. They detail Taboritsky's corpse rotting, nature recovering from constant chemical bombardment, and Russia reunifying in its entirety, including Moscow.

Can we play a part in this process?

No

Can we even see Russia reunify?

No

Is there any reason I should "play" the collapse instead of opening up the localisation files and reading all the events for "Tabby Becomes Dead?"

No!

 

[Sooty Soot]

im going insane trying to change the starting leader, why is it so hard to make khrushchev the leader instead of kaganovich?

 

[Notorious N.I.G]

i will admit that playing as the AWD in TFR motivated me to read Siege, i havent become a fullon siegeite because thats just retarded but there some ideas in there ive incorporated into my ideological thought. if im being honest i might read the communist manifesto now

There's also that one book James Mason wrote in which he compares the Bible and Mein Kampf, with the general gist being that Christianity and National Socialism are by extension the same thing. He wrote it during his stint in Prison, Prior Mason was an Atheist and if i recall hanged around numerous Satanist figures, however the book does give insight into you could say the religious view of Mason himself.
I am pretty sure that whoever was doing the stuff for AWD in the mod had also likely read the book to get some ideas for the Christian path. The book's name is "The Theocrat"

However the most autistic book i've read would've been Liber 333, that shit is genuinely just so retarded that it accidentally becomes funny, I don't understand how somebody can read shit about becoming a "Noctulian" and using "Vampyric" Powers to own the Jews and then proceed to unironically believe that. Haven't had a chance to read "Irongates" but i've heard it's just goofy rape fantasies in an attempt to garner shock value.

these redditors would probably have developed the same world view without HoI4, with the game only accelerating the process.

I don't think so, While there are contributing factors like the political beliefs of an individuals household that can mold their politics, I think HOI4 does open up some people to niche political beliefs and therefore allows some of these people to adorn the persona of "Look at me, i'm special because i follow Socialism with George Floydian characteristics, i'm right and your all gay and wrong"

It does more harm to their conceptualization of politics than it does good.

 

[glue eater]

i will admit that playing as the AWD in TFR motivated me to read Siege, i havent become a fullon siegeite because thats just retarded but there some ideas in there ive incorporated into my ideological thought. if im being honest i might read the communist manifesto now

People act like reading Communist Manifesto is some sort of undertaking when its like 16 pages. Now reading siege is a different thing, its like 600 pages.

 

[Toji Suzuhara]

People act like reading Communist Manifesto is some sort of undertaking when its like 16 pages. Now reading siege is
a different thing, its like 600 pages.

As the Eurasianist path in TFR tells us, zoomers don't care about theory, they just want to burn school books and stab a cosmunaut

 

[Notorious N.I.G]

People act like reading Communist Manifesto is some sort of undertaking when its like 16 pages. Now reading siege is
a different thing, its like 600 pages.

Not even mentioning the fact that there are different editions of it as well, considering Siege wasn't even originally an entire book and rather just a collection of writings from when Mason was in the American Nazi Party and later the NSLF. I could be wrong but there was a quote from Mason in which he did talk about how George Lincoln Rockwell actually talked him out of shooting up a school. Can't recall if it was ever mentioned in the book or if it was mentioned in an interview.

 

[Sooty Soot]

The last few events that fire are a joke. They detail Taboritsky's corpse rotting, nature recovering from constant chemical bombardment, and Russia reunifying in its entirety, including Moscow.

one of the events is told from svetlana stalinas POV iirc, and its in the 2010s/2000s cuz it references phones

 

[GoodWinSon]

im going insane trying to change the starting leader, why is it so hard to make khrushchev the leader instead of kaganovich?

Check Tyumen's history file and see if there's something to the effect of recruit_character = kagonovich. If there is, comment it out and make sure that Khrushchev is recruited in the history file. Then check Tyumens character file and make sure that Khrushchev set as the leader of the authsoc party. If he is not, set him as so and for extra assurance, remove Kagonovich's assigned character roles.

If you've already done this then check other files in history and common to make sure there isn't some other file assigning Kagonovich as your leader. You can search up Kagonovich's character tag to make this easier.

I haven't taken too close a look at neu-tnos code but I'm assuming they're using the character system.

 

[Sooty Soot]

Check Tyumen's history file and see if there's something to the effect of recruit_character = kagonovich. If there is, comment it out and make sure that Khrushchev is recruited in the history file. Then check Tyumens character file and make sure that Khrushchev set as the leader of the authsoc party. If he is not, set him as so and for extra assurance, remove Kagonovich's assigned character roles.

If you've already done this then check other files in history and common to make sure there isn't some other file assigning Kagonovich as your leader. You can search up Kagonovich's character tag to make this easier.

I haven't taken too close a look at neu-tnos code but I'm assuming they're using the character system.

they are, i decided to change scrap kaganoviches character tag completely and replaced it with TYM_Leonid_Brezhnev. thing is tyumen starts out with no leader, and im a 100% positive that i checked all the files, even khrushchevs works since i can make him the leader through his coup event. ill check the other commons files

 

[NashSuvorov]

After Midnight's gameplay exclusively involves... you guessed it, clicking buttons. AM is an encapsulation of everything wrong with TNO. It has the pretty gui, the countless tags, the flowery events, and of course, the zero gameplay. In fact, it has negative gameplay! It punishes you for playing an obscure and difficult to find path, and punishes the devs who now have to take this collapse into account for future content! (That is, if the Last Days devs ever made content past 1972 which is unlikely at this point.)

So are you arguing that the path that has you look for a dead kid while chemically bombing most of Russia, causing Pol Pot-level casualty events, doing away with education, completely ignore the outside world, executing everyone who ends up in a courtroom because "everyone has sinned and all sins are equal" and probably some other things im forgetting right now, should have you be able to go to 2WRW and survive for a thousand years or something?

I really don't get this idea that the AM collapse is a punishment on the player. It is only an inevitable conclusion of everything that you spend 10 in-game years doing. Better yet, Taboritsky basically has post-unification content due to After Midnight, even if they're just event chains and some arcade mode opportunities to reunify Russia with accompanying news events. Other warlords get like one event to change the leader's portait like Amur I think. I don't think the AM collapse is some kind of grand gesture about realism or "nazism must fall" or something like that. Now, it does have elements of commiewanking like Kardashev's outfit by the Urals, Stalinist Orenburg, Nowa Polska and Alexei III.

Having Taboritsky's regime be able to survive would make the experience actively more boring. It would make it feel sandboxy in a way that does a disservice to TNO - "the numbers went up, you have all the divisions, you will win all the battles because you are the player and it doesnt actually matter what actions you take, you win anyway." It would just feel like vanilla, where there's no cause/effect aside from player interaction and RNG because there isn't any need or reason for that.

Also, it's not negative content because Taboritsky's Russia always collapsed, it just used to go completely black before AM like Heydrich's Germany.

 

[GoodWinSon]

So are you arguing that the path that has you look for a dead kid while chemically bombing most of Russia, causing Pol Pot-level casualty events, doing away with education, completely ignore the outside world, executing everyone who ends up in a courtroom because "everyone has sinned and all sins are equal" and probably some other things im forgetting right now, should have you be able to go to 2WRW and survive for a thousand years or something?

I really don't get this idea that the AM collapse is a punishment on the player. It is only an inevitable conclusion of everything that you spend 10 in-game years doing. Better yet, Taboritsky basically has post-unification content due to After Midnight, even if they're just event chains and some arcade mode opportunities to reunify Russia with accompanying news events. Other warlords get like one event to change the leader's portait like Amur I think. I don't think the AM collapse is some kind of grand gesture about realism or "nazism must fall" or something like that. Now, it does have elements of commiewanking like Kardashev's outfit by the Urals, Stalinist Orenburg, Nowa Polska and Alexei III.

I think you misunderstand my argument. I am arguing that AM fails on a gameplay level rather than a narrative one. Nonetheless allow me to provide a quote from few posts earlier. You may have missed it.

That he wanted them to always collapse a la TNO so that the Chuds cannot be happy or get their fantasy to project onto. To many their brainrot has stepped in and if you are not constantly reminding people how bad they are during fascist or auth soc paths then your mod must support that.

There's a difference between showing the player and then lecturing them. Most functional individuals will understand that Tabby isn't an example to be followed, that his actions are despicable and he deserves all the worst. Yet, as a player, my freedom to continue the game should not be inhibited by what characters do inside the game. If you are going to punish the player in a gameplay sense, punish them for their own idiotic actions and not the actions of whoever they're playing as.

It's insulting as well. The developer provided me with the freedom to take this path, and now I'm told that I can't play anymore because I was too naughty? That's idiotic and no competent developer does that. For instance, Fallout New Vegas lets you be an evil bastard. It will tell you you're an evil bastard, but it will never tell you "ah yeah sorry you can't do the Battle of Hoover Dam because you killed too many people. You should be nicer next time mmm'kay?"

Of course, I'm saying this assuming there would be content to play after unification. AM is yet another dead end path which TNO is positively littered in. I don't know if you've ever modded hoi4, but adding events, writing localisation, scripting gui, making custom art, and bug testing allllll of that takes time. Time which could be better spent elsewhere, considering the state of Last Days.

I really don't get this idea that the AM collapse is a punishment on the player. It is only an inevitable conclusion of everything that you spend 10 in-game years doing. Better yet, Taboritsky basically has post-unification content due to After Midnight, even if they're just event chains and some arcade mode opportunities to reunify Russia with accompanying news events. Other warlords get like one event to change the leader's portait like Amur I think. I don't think the AM collapse is some kind of grand gesture about realism or "nazism must fall" or something like that. Now, it does have elements of commiewanking like Kardashev's outfit by the Urals, Stalinist Orenburg, Nowa Polska and Alexei III.

Having Taboritsky's regime be able to survive would make the experience actively more boring. It would make it feel sandboxy in a way that does a disservice to TNO - "the numbers went up, you have all the divisions, you will win all the battles because you are the player and it doesnt actually matter what actions you take, you win anyway." It would just feel like vanilla, where there's no cause/effect aside from player interaction and RNG because there isn't any need or reason for that.

His "content" involves linear event chains with 0 input from the player. This might be fine for a visual novel, yet many of those still give the player some agency. I'm not saying TNO should be like vanilla, but neither should hoi4 be like a visual novel. You and the troono devs seem to be unable or unwilling to acknowledge that hoi4, at its core, is an army building, map painting, power fantasy game. Everyone laughs at KRG, because despite all the effort put into it, it has almost zero war, and thus, almost zero substantial gameplay. Why should a player play a game where they sit around and do nothing? Better yet, why should a player play a game where their efforts are rewarded with gameplay where they sit around and do nothing? As I stated before, it would be better to cheat then to waste your time getting AM legit.

Also, it's not negative content because Taboritsky's Russia always collapsed, it just used to go completely black before AM like Heydrich's Germany.

So what's the damn point about spending effort on a DEAD END PATH? Is Russia turning into a black void not enough? There's nothing past it, hell, you have to go out of your way to see it. Every other Russian path, even the other evil ones, leave the player with a sense that there's more to come, while Tabby's path leaves an overcomplicated mess of tags that future devs have to build around. Even if you don't even make a continuation of AM, you still now have to take it into account when changing Russian states, tags, etc. Otherwise it'll be left a buggy mess.

AM is self congratulatory nonsense. Pacifica and his Ilk would rather play with their dolls than make a good mod for people to play.

At the end of it all there's a really easy way to make AM better; make it a choice. If I the player want to see Tabby's empire rot, then I should be the one to pull the trigger. If I want to see Tabby's successors continue the nightmare, then I should also have that choice. That's just more fun, and if it's not fun then why bother?

 

[Happy Camper]

Pacifica is the only one I can name. Funnily enough, the last thing Pacifica was involved in before leaving was Tabby's After Midnight collapse.

After Midnight's gameplay exclusively involves... you guessed it, clicking buttons.

No disrespect, but this is factually wrong. For starters, Pacifica did quit after AM, but later rejoined to finish up the economy expansion (which yes, is all about clicking buttons, and then leading again).
Furthermore, AM invovles you getting a chance to fight a war and re-unify Russia for a final epilogue. I don't blame you if you didn't get there though because you have to read through several dozens of walls of text to get to that point and based on leaks that pert was something that lower-rank team members had to fight for to get there in the first place. Assuming that it's still in, I wouldn't put it past the current team to delete it based on where things have been going for the past few years.

Honestly, all of this would've worked better if they let you pick a side that you wanted off the bat and made it clear that actual gameplay was in the cards. But I suppose you can't let yucky gameplay get in the way of a narrative with these people. Even if you want to tell a story, make it a singular one. I unified Russia again as one of the Burgundian System tags, but I would've liked to not spend half an hour wading through irrelevant shit there. And if you want commie wish fulfillment, let people just pick a communist tag and proceed from there. People who want all the lore would still have the opportunity to read it anyway. But no, you have to sit through everything like an unskippable ad on a bluray disc.

 

[Sooty Soot]

Tabby should be able to survive and live on if the player withstands huge debuffs while reunifying russia (population loss, increased resistance gain, next to zero compliance gain, reduced division org) tl;dr earn your bad ending, and if you choose not to take the debuffs you get AM when you reunify russia. this would be as easy as setting up a few events that let the player choose, setting up a scripted effect counter that goes up the more debuffs you stand, and writing loc for those events and the tabby survival post reunification

 

[NashSuvorov]

It's insulting as well. The developer provided me with the freedom to take this path, and now I'm told that I can't play anymore because I was too naughty? That's idiotic and no competent developer does that. For instance, Fallout New Vegas lets you be an evil bastard. It will tell you you're an evil bastard, but it will never tell you "ah yeah sorry you can't do the Battle of Hoover Dam because you killed too many people.

Fallout: New Vegas also allows you to drop to 0 HP and die. Taking Taboritsky's path is inherently self-destructive and is the F:NV equivalent of lobbing Holy Frag Grenades at your feet until you die. It's just that that kind of gameplay doesn't work in an RPG as well as it does in a grand strategy game. Taboritsky's path is pretty much about witnessing the destruction of Russia, and its collapse isn't because Taboritsky is too big of a meanie. Taboritsky's path destroys Russia because of all the self-destructive things it does - Velimir doesn't collapse like this, Yazov doesn't collapse like this and the other far-right or far-left warlords don't collapse like this despite being close to Taboritsky in terms of how warped their worldviews are. Also, TNO is built fundamentally with the view that it has a stopping point - Even if hell freezes over and TNO2 releases, the mod will still end in 1982. AM is simply the conclusion of Taboritsky's narrative in the way that storming the Kremlin would be the conclusion for Zhukov's narrative. Gameplay-wise, there isn't anything left undone in TNO1 that other warlords do.

Of course, I'm saying this assuming there would be content to play after unification. AM is yet another dead end path which TNO is positively littered in.

Except, no. AM lays out what happens next in Russia in a way that other conclusions to other paths don't. Putting this in the same boat as Schörner's coup or post-Heydrich anarchy is simply unfair. The political intrigues, future conflicts and future of Russia are all set up. I don't know if there is ever an intention to make something more for the AM warlords, but it isn't a simple dead end.

I don't know if you've ever modded hoi4, but adding events, writing localisation, scripting gui, making custom art, and bug testing allllll of that takes time. Time which could be better spent elsewhere, considering the state of Last Days.

I've spent a good chunk of time modding HOI4, and AM's content is pretty simple. There's a fancy clock gui, a bunch of events, some recycled tags and a decision category. The energy spent on AM likely wouldn't have made a substantial difference anywhere else.

His "content" involves linear event chains with 0 input from the player. This might be fine for a visual novel, yet many of those still give the player some agency. I'm not saying TNO should be like vanilla, but neither should hoi4 be like a visual novel. You and the troono devs seem to be unable or unwilling to acknowledge that hoi4, at its core, is an army building, map painting, power fantasy game.

AM's content is like that because it serves as the conclusion/climax/payoff to what you have been doing for the past 10 in-game years. You get to see what happens next. Also, TNO might not be your cup of tea, but arguing that a mod isn't something that the base game is seems fallacious. Are we to write off the Sonic the Hedgehog mod for Doom because it radically alters what Doom is at its core? What's wrong with taking a power fantasy simulator and turning it into something different?

Better yet, why should a player play a game where their efforts are rewarded with gameplay where they sit around and do nothing?

Most paths in TNO end with an end screen. AM is basically an advanced form of that with much more depth. Getting AM implies you are already invested in the path and want to keep going. I'd think of it as dessert to the main course of Taboritsky's path proper and the entree of initial Komi gameplay.

So what's the damn point about spending effort on a DEAD END PATH? Is Russia turning into a black void not enough? There's nothing past it, hell, you have to go out of your way to see it. Every other Russian path, even the other evil ones, leave the player with a sense that there's more to come, while Tabby's path leaves an overcomplicated mess of tags that future devs have to build around.

Is there "nothing more to come" in the world's newest unresolvable geopolitical quagmire of a region? There is more to come in the different narratives set up in AM, just that it isn't 2WRW.

At the end of it all there's a really easy way to make AM better; make it a choice. If I the player want to see Tabby's empire rot, then I should be the one to pull the trigger. If I want to see Tabby's successors continue the nightmare, then I should also have that choice. That's just more fun, and if it's not fun then why bother?

You did pull that trigger by manoeuvring the Komi Right into power, having Taboritsky win the power struggle inside the Komi Right, defeating everyone else in West Russia, then West Siberia, making all of Taboritsky's policies into reality and then unifying Russia itself under Taboritsky. It's more respectful of the player's intelligence to have cause and effect play out, especially in a narrative mod like TNO. If you could just avoid AM by taking a debuff or whatever have you, where does the narrative go forward? More people die? Larionov just replaces Taboritsky? Maybe 2WRW so Taboritsky/Larionov could find more people to kill, but why would Taboritsky, arguably the second most pro-Hitler unifier behind Gutrum Vagner, pick a fight with Germany? The outcome of AM is purely determined by player action, which I'll grant that it is restricted, but it is restricted purely by what Taboritsky and his regime is and what they represent. It's also the reason why you can't burn churches as Alexander Men or initiate economic shock therapy as Tukhachevsky. If you leave everything up to player choice (such as allowing the player to simply not follow up on what the player has been setting up since 1962), then no choices you make matter because they can just be undone later down the line.

AM is self congratulatory nonsense. Pacifica and his Ilk would rather play with their dolls than make a good mod for people to play.

Honestly, I think Russia (with some exceptions like LibSoc SBA, LibSoc Sablin) is the one part of TNO that has this problem the least between the overhyped wikiscrape that is Mexico, the in-game toosing in the interesting countries screen, the entirety of the Hart path, the constant and unending reworks, the removal of Göring and Heydrich and the sheer ragebait that is Ostland. Although that last one might just be my personal pet peeve.

 

[GoodWinSon]

Honestly, I think Russia (with some exceptions like LibSoc SBA, LibSoc Sablin) is the one part of TNO that has this problem the least between the overhyped wikiscrape that is Mexico, the in-game toosing in the interesting countries screen, the entirety of the Hart path, the constant and unending reworks, the removal of Göring and Heydrich and the sheer ragebait that is Ostland. Although that last one might just be my personal pet peeve.

It seems we have different tastes in regards to games and the like, though perhaps we agree on more than I originally thought. I'm truly sorry if I was curt with you. However, I stand by my primary argument. That being it disappoints me to see so much thought and work be put into something so tangential; so minor. It doesn't help AM is just about clicking buttons. And after several tests games of TNO, clicking buttons is the last thing I want to do.

 

[Aisin Gioro Puyi]

the worst part of TNO is the tantalizing idea of an alt-history cold war experience, where im told that i can play as the USA and save the world from jap tyranny and teutonic hegemony, when all you really get is "proxy wars" that amount to pressing buttons and praying that the RNG on the retarded minigames they come up actually works in your favor.
then, to top it all off, i cant even stand to replay these minigames and wars to develop a coherent strategy, because im being bombarded with literally hundreds of events full of text that constantly interrupt my micro and get in my fucking way
i dont give a FUCK about some asshole writing a book, or a black kid being scared of george wallace, or brazilian election results
i really could give a shit less about your character drama
I WANT THE ECONOMY TO GO UP
I WANT NATIONAL PRESTIGE TO GO UP
I WANT TO WIN THE COLD WAR

 

[Sooty Soot]

ok so it turns out it was another mod that was making tyumen be leaderless, i have some suspicions that it was a mod called 'stalinist tanks' thats supposed to only modify tech icons and names, keyword: supposed
anyways it should be smooth sailing from here, i'll rewrite all the relevant loc, maybe make some portraits for custom advisors too but that's gonna be a pain in the ass since i dont have the source image for the advisor portrait outline.
ive also scrapped khrushchevs portrait, the key to making good portraits is to choose a big (600x800+ image) closeup. ill be back when modified some of the code.