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

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@GoodWinSon You're doing good stuff, man. Glad to hear that the mod will be open source.

Some spergry inbound, but I don't really understand why a lot of HOI4 mods are closed-source, to be honest. The only OSS one I can think of off the top of my head is Kaiserredux. TNO especially could benefit from it, because if the devs are sitting on their ass the community might as well contribute something. You could even fork the mod at any time and build off it if you don't like the direction the development is going in. And it's likely that releases would be faster from more people being able to contribute as well as bugs being caught before major releases

It's not like there's any major incentive for it to be closed-source - anybody can access all the mod's internals anyway and paid mods aren't a thing in HOI4. It just seems like a circlejerk "exclusive club" thing at the expense of people actually being able to contribute to something they like without having to fill out and wait for "applications" (as if you need a resume and CV for modding a map painter, bitch please). The only downside I can think of is that there might be a bunch of garbage pull requests which devs would have to take time to review, but if your devs don't work anyway, who cares?
 
Because I'm a stupid idiot who can't control himself, I started adding more content to Italian Algeria
20250102180603_1.jpg

I'm just going to give them two paths (colonial government vs local authority), a shared military tree and stop myself there. Otherwise I'm going to end up coding an oil extraction minigame and then there will really no hope for me
One thing i've noticed while reading through the events is that they can actually escalate into WW3. TNO devs are so busy making a visual novel they forgot to actually implement things going hot
My nitpick with TNO's ww3 (aside from being suicide, to the point where you're allowed to disable it), is that it's kind of random, when it really shouldn't be. If for example, Germany and the US start a war over Africa and the US wins and annexes Germany then two things happen:
A. A lot of content breaks because much of it is coded with the assumption there will always be a Germany (the German anarchy was even disabled, I discovered)
B. If one great Power beats up all their rivals by 1967 what's the point of playing to 1972, or 1982?
I'd think you'd have to make it scripted like KX and the second weltkrieg, which almost always happens in 1939
I remember there was a guy on the TNO team working on Free France who got kicked out for making six monarchist paths.
I only have a Bonapartist path listed in my notes, and it's partially a reference to the real world and dearly departed Central African Empire
You could tie it to surrender percentage where a nuclear exchange isn't the first choice but a Samson Option.
I guess you could do that and give home island states an a massive local defense boost to keep the ai from invading the home islands. It'd be gamey but I can't think of anything else.
Surprised the devs went this route with Eurasia, since even the niggas on TV tropes note that

  • Gumilyov's beliefs in TNO are far more politicized and supremacist than OTL, with many Duginist influences. The real Gumilyov had little interest in "physicalizing" his theoretical Eurasia into a Eurasian empire. Politically, the real Gumilyov was largely apathetic, and, unlike the far-right Neo-Eurasians that appropriated his theories, he never criticized democracy, liberalism, or Russian Catholicism, and he certainly wasn't interested in pushing Russia back into the Middle Ages with "Masterocracy".
  • One other key difference is that the real-world Gumilyov did not go so far as to argue for the supremacy of one ethnose over all others; that was largely a misappropriation of his ideas by later disciples.
Like, it's just because Dugin would be too young to be put in the mod so they put another dude as an stand in?

Pretty much. Same with how Serov was supposed to be the NazBol option for Russia, but any actual Russian NazBol would've been too young for the 1962-1972 timeframe (aka Eduard Limonov). So... They picked a KGB officer who was just... Kind of vaguely antisemitic? I can't even recall what made Serov enough of a antisemitic chud for ol' Freddie Freaker to designate him as the NazBol.
I'm convinced a lot of Russian paths were just thrown in for the laughs, even if they weren't the most time period appropriate. You can have Yeltsin face off against Civil War Whites, despite the fact that the times when each was relevant are nearly a century apart.
Basically this. If the lead devs are not perfectionist control freaks, they're completely apathetic, which isn't much better.
 
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@GoodWinSon You're doing good stuff, man. Glad to hear that the mod will be open source.

Some spergry inbound, but I don't really understand why a lot of HOI4 mods are closed-source, to be honest. The only OSS one I can think of off the top of my head is Kaiserredux. TNO especially could benefit from it, because if the devs are sitting on their ass the community might as well contribute something. You could even fork the mod at any time and build off it if you don't like the direction the development is going in. And it's likely that releases would be faster from more people being able to contribute as well as bugs being caught before major releases

It's not like there's any major incentive for it to be closed-source - anybody can access all the mod's internals anyway and paid mods aren't a thing in HOI4. It just seems like a circlejerk "exclusive club" thing at the expense of people actually being able to contribute to something they like without having to fill out and wait for "applications" (as if you need a resume and CV for modding a map painter, bitch please). The only downside I can think of is that there might be a bunch of garbage pull requests which devs would have to take time to review, but if your devs don't work anyway, who cares?
No I agree. Even on this thread this was mentioned about KR waaaaay back. A lot of these devs think their projects and fanfictions are like the Manhatten Project. I feel its cause they are wannabe game devs and so think their mod are actual game dev type shit. People who actually deal in real coding though tend to share stuff as open source. TBH I want them OSS for a different reason: accountability. If the shit is OSS then you can tell if they are working on it or not. Funny enough TWR did this to prove to its fans that it was still updating the mod and working on it. So plus for them even if they TNO-ified the mod for some fucking reason.
 
I only have a Bonapartist path listed in my notes, and it's partially a reference to the real world and dearly departed Central African Empire
Honestly, I don't think Free France should even be 'Free' - if anyone cared a whit about realism in TNO there would have already been some reconciliation between the remaining French colonies and the Metropole, and Algiers would have remained a French colony. Bonapartism wouldn't even be a consideration either - it was a functionally dead dynastic movement post-Boulanger and would be even more so in a setting where someone like Petain remained in power.
 
Played thatchers content, unironically better than most modern TrooNO focus trees since you actually get to use your army. I fought wales, Scotland, HMMLR, and had to micro single divisions across several proxy conflicts (which i did thru allowdiplo). I just wish there was more to the foreign policy tree, like actually getting nukes and being added to the superpower UI since the whole point of trying to stay neutral in the foreign policy minigame is to become the fifth superpower.

If australia of all countries (and now turkey in the most recent update) can get nukes then so should Britiain.
 
My nitpick with TNO's ww3 (aside from being suicide, to the point where you're allowed to disable it), is that it's kind of random, when it really shouldn't be. If for example, Germany and the US start a war over Africa and the US wins and annexes Germany then two things happen:
A. A lot of content breaks because much of it is coded with the assumption there will always be a Germany (the German anarchy was even disabled, I discovered)
B. If one great Power beats up all their rivals by 1967 what's the point of playing to 1972, or 1982?
I'd think you'd have to make it scripted like KX and the second weltkrieg, which almost always happens in 1939
My two cents about WW3 requiring specific developments to happen throughout the playthrough is to do away with the idea of every run covering the entire Cold War. Instead, make use of bookmarks as separate point of divergences in the timeline where it became inevitable through destabilizing events in that timeframe. HOI4's role was to simulate conflicts and buildups to a massive global war. Original TNO's attempt to use it as a base for visual storytelling isn't exactly stupid, but it was not executed in a compelling enough way to counter the diminished role of warfare in its gameplay. I also think it's open knowledge that the Clausewitz engine chokes like a bitch the longer you play a save.
 
I also think it's open knowledge that the Clausewitz engine chokes like a bitch the longer you play a save.
It took me a week or two to play from 1949 to 1983 as the USSR in cold war iron curtain, i cant imagine how slow it'd be if there a billion variablws, flags, and scripted effects nevermimd the economy system
 
What happened to that post ww2 mod where the economy doesn't boom and it creates a lot of chaos and it had a lot of obscure sub ideologies, one being called dead water in Russia and I also think you could nuke Baghdad in the mod and it would unleash some hidden supernatural force?
 
What happened to that post ww2 mod where the economy doesn't boom and it creates a lot of chaos and it had a lot of obscure sub ideologies, one being called dead water in Russia and I also think you could nuke Baghdad in the mod and it would unleash some hidden supernatural force?
As far as I can tell its in the same kind of infinte teaser development hell most hoi4 mods end up in. Their reddit is dead and I don't have a discord account so I can't speak to their server. https://www.reddit.com/r/EGDmod/
 
There's alot of unused content buried within TNOs code. There are quite a few focus trees I've uncovered and weird enough many of them have content. Here's Turkey's opening tree
View attachment 6811581
Here's Cameroon's. This one actually has effects while the tree after it is just a skeleton.
View attachment 6811582
Here's Iraqs. This one has lots of content and was tied to a political mechanic, but a lot of events and other code has been deleted. Saddam is a democracy advocate, for your information
View attachment 6811583
Here's Italian Algeria's focus tree. This one I decided to fix up because while it's quite small, it's basically finished. Only major problem was that it has this terrible bandit suppression mechanic that was coded so poorly it could lock you out of half the focus tree and leave you with duplicated ideas. It was easy to fix which makes me wonder why it was essentially buried.
View attachment 6811566
The mechanic in question
View attachment 6811580
Here's Kaukasias opening tree. This one's just a skeleton but it has enough code still in the game to switch between different paths
View attachment 6811575
There's a few events for some sort of English civil war between Stirling, HMMLR plus collaborators, and the BUF
View attachment 6811570
And finally I attached localisation for several non-existent events. Mostly British. Highlights include a Trotskyite takeover of England, a syndicalist take over, and a diplomatic crisis between OFN Scotland and collaborator England.
Wasn't there a lot of unfinished stuff for Free France by that guy that did the 4 monarchist focus trees that Panzer let go?
 
I'm so FUCKING tired of all these shitty news events about South East Asia. I don't give a FUCK what fucking flavor of despotist military dictator just did a coup in Thailand or whatever other obscure shithole, and you know for fact that some ESL shitskin made all these events so his irrelevant country would be known for something other than child prostitutes. Like holy shit, Thailand has like 6-7+ different leaders and SEVERAL paths in the game rules, and the worst part that none of them matter in the grand scheme of things, Thailand always stays in the GEACPS no matter what.
 
I'll never understand why modders don't finish at least a few countries before they announce their mod.
Everybody believes that they can just patch it in later and that releasing while the hype is still up will help them reach more people. Safe to say that almost never happens
 
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I'm so FUCKING tired of all these shitty news events about South East Asia. I don't give a FUCK what fucking flavor of despotist military dictator just did a coup in Thailand or whatever other obscure shithole, and you know for fact that some ESL shitskin made all these events so his irrelevant country would be known for something other than child prostitutes. Like holy shit, Thailand has like 6-7+ different leaders and SEVERAL paths in the game rules, and the worst part that none of them matter in the grand scheme of things, Thailand always stays in the GEACPS no matter what.
Yeah, don't understand it. KR to its credit has interesting paths for minors that can alter how much of a pain it can be for a great power. TNO has no content to SEA monkey nations and half of them can't even send volunteers to help out Japan nor do they leave the sphere by changing ideology.
 
I'm so FUCKING tired of all these shitty news events about South East Asia. I don't give a FUCK what fucking flavor of despotist military dictator just did a coup in Thailand or whatever other obscure shithole, and you know for fact that some ESL shitskin made all these events so his irrelevant country would be known for something other than child prostitutes. Like holy shit, Thailand has like 6-7+ different leaders and SEVERAL paths in the game rules, and the worst part that none of them matter in the grand scheme of things, Thailand always stays in the GEACPS no matter what.
They didn't even have the balls to add Pol Pot either. Literally the only reason why someone would care about any SEAmonkey content aside from maybe Vietnam (mainly for the novelty of America supporting the VC in this timeline lol much like Castro's Cuba). It didn't help either that there's no Singapore in TrooNO timeline either so no Switzerland of Asia either. VGH!
 
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