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

[ConfederateIrishman]

I honestly had no idea that Zabrowski used to use Stormfront before turning to Vaush. I had him down as the average Reddit leftist. If you have more content on his lolcowdom I'd like to see it.

One of the problems is that most of the things I have heard are rumors from devs who got purged from the mod outside of the occasional screenshot I get, so it is not exactly something I can verify.

For example, I can verify that he had some sort of interaction with someone underage while drunk then bragged about it,

,but a lot of other points I don't really have saved or archived.

 

[Pointless Pedant]

One of the problems is that most of the things I have heard are rumors from devs who got purged from the mod outside of the occasional screenshot I get, so it is not exactly something I can verify.

For example, I can verify that he had some sort of interaction with someone underage while drunk then bragged about it,
View attachment 1762006
,but a lot of other points I don't really have saved or archived.

Sounds more like a misunderstanding than Vaush-style paedo antics unless there's any more evidence, although it would be interesting to hear his views on Vaush's vocal pro-CP advocacy. If anybody here is on the Discord there might be something.

 

[ConfederateIrishman]

Sounds more like a misunderstanding than Vaush-style paedo antics unless there's any more evidence, although it would be interesting to hear his views on Vaush's vocal pro-CP advocacy. If anybody here is on the Discord there might be something.

Right.

I guess I could talk about the absolute shadow the hedgehog-edge tier content they had in the mod than quietly removed. Such as the entirety of the India.

So one of the paths they cut was where Lord Mountbatten rises up in the Indian anarchy (if their civil war goes on too long), proceeds to lead his force of literal cannibal Anglos to reconquer India.

I'll just quote the direct event file localizations:

india.202.desc:0 "To the horror of many, blood runs through the streets and corpses litter the alleyways of the city of Bombay as a paramilitary force known as the British Defense League has declared a great crusade against the native governments in the name of the House of Windsor and revenge for the former Raj. Led by the aging and seemingly deranged Louis Mountbatten, the League won't stop their onslaught until they've ended native rule and reinstated the rule of Britons.\n\nMountbatten himself has proclaimed that enough is enough! In his eyes, the continuing civil war is definite proof of the Indians' incapability of self-rule and the necessity of the white man's dominance. He says that, like a child, it is necessary to punish the natives for the betrayal of their benefactors, and that great sacrifices and changes must be made to ensure the survival and liberation of the Briton both in India and abroad.\n\nWhile many Indians and Britons alike see him as nothing but a deranged and washed up old soldier, his rhetoric of retribution has come to appeal to the desperate, hateful, and nostalgic who wish for some sense of order in this harrowing chaos, regardless of how it must come."
[7:02 PM]

india.226.desc:0 "The shouting started just after midnight.\n\nPeople opened their doors, curious as to what was happening, only to have the English devils' guns rammed into their faces. They were forced out and all marched to the town center, in front of a massive bonfire that had been thrown together from old wood and quickly-cut trees. the blaze continued to grow higher in conjunction with the crowd, and soon everyone was either rounded up or had fled to the surrounding wilds. the starving townsfolk cried and wept, for they expected a proclamation that they were now under the governance of the restored Raj. These well-fed soldiers would take what little food was still left, and the abandoned villagers would all waste away.\n\nTheir suffering was much less prolonged.\n\nWith not even an announcement of what was happening, the British opened fire and massacred all they had gathered. Not a one escaped, but a few managed to play dead, feigning death when they were only injured. They would soon come to regret that choice. the demons gathered the corpses into rough piles, searching them for anything of use. When they found one that was still alive, they would haul it over and toss it straight into the fire. the maimed screeched in agony as the flames consumed them. the already-dead were then brought to roast, and soon the Englishmen held an unholy feast, gnawing on children's bones and tearing into the flesh of young men. They departed just as the sun was rising, taking what they could and leaving a massive heap of charred and half-eaten corpses. Almost no one dares to reenter the village, horrified of what they will find there.\n\nIn times like these, however, there are a desperate few who will not let such a massive amount of food go to waste."

india.227.a:0 "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!"
india.227.b:0 "Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live."

This is why I can't really take the dev's call for sanity seriously when can you dig into the files and find constant events like this.

 

[Pointless Pedant]

Right.

I guess I could talk about the absolute shadow the hedgehog-edge tier content they had in the mod than quietly removed. Such as the entirety of the India.
View attachment 1762011
So one of the paths they cut was where Lord Mountbatten rises up in the Indian anarchy (if their civil war goes on too long), proceeds to lead his force of literal cannibal Anglos to reconquer India.

I'll just quote the direct event file localizations:





This is why I can't really take the dev's call for sanity seriously when can you dig into the files and find constant events like this.

Mountbatten was allegedly a paedophile according to some accounts so I'm not exactly going to leap up to defend him, but that is just absurdly beyond retarded. The mod is set decades after WW2, when British rule over India would be a distant memory, and even in reality when the allies won Britain completely lost control over the region as soon as the war was over. Also any attempt by cannibal maniacs to conquer the entire country of India would get thwarted instantly. India loves rioting.

Insulting the legend Mad Jack Churchill like that is unforgivable, too. Did they fire whatever retard wrote this?

 

[ConfederateIrishman]

Mountbatten was allegedly a paedophile according to some accounts so I'm not exactly going to leap up to defend him, but that is just absurdly beyond retarded. The mod is set decades after WW2, when British rule over India would be a distant memory, and even in reality when the allies won Britain completely lost control over the region as soon as the war was over. Also any attempt by cannibal maniacs to conquer the entire country of India would get thwarted instantly. India loves rioting.

Insulting the legend Mad Jack Churchill like that is unforgivable, too. Did they fire whatever retard wrote this?

From what I heard it was more of a team than a single person that wrote India, but yes since all of the India content was thrown out I think they were probably purged. Still, you can find the same sort of uber-edge language (once the events get edgy enough they all sound like they come from the same writer) in places like the Chinese Warlord who revolts against Japan.

The thing about TNO's development is that it was completely compartimentalized so teams would work on entire regions not knowing what the other compartments were doing. This meant that there was constantly drama when, say, Panzer would take a look at a region: For example, almost entire east asian team was fired (he publily annouced this) because he felt they were whitewashing Imperial Japan too much, and all of Romania's content was removed because the guy working on it was discovered in a plot to overthrow Panzer with other devs (who were ratted out by another dev who wanted to gain more influence with Panzer).

This system worked well for Panzer because with everyone competeing for influence in different teams like this he was always on top as long as he wanted to be.

 

[Pointless Pedant]

From what I heard it was more of a team than a single person that wrote India, but yes since all of the India content was thrown out I think they were probably purged. Still, you can find the same sort of uber-edge language (once the events get edgy enough they all sound like they come from the same writer) in places like the Chinese Warlord who revolts against Japan.

The thing about TNO's development is that it was completely compartimentalized so teams would work on entire regions not knowing what the other compartments were doing. This meant that there was constantly drama when, say, Panzer would take a look at a region: For example, almost entire east asian team was fired (he publily annouced this) because he felt they were whitewashing Imperial Japan too much, and all of Romania's content was removed because the guy working on it was discovered in a plot to overthrow Panzer with other devs (who were ratted out by another dev who wanted to gain more influence with Panzer).

This system worked well for Panzer because with everyone competeing for influence in different teams like this he was always on top as long as he wanted to be.

The Japanese invasion of China was extraordinarily brutal so extreme violence makes sense in that context, though it may have been written poorly. Turning Mountbatten into a cannibal and having him rampage through 1960s India decades after he went home is just plain retarded and was so bad that the same people who approved Germany draining the Mediterranean and turning southern Europe into a desert thought it was a bit much.

 

[Gay Scientologist]

I can contribute a few things, I've known Pinkpanzer for about 7-8 years now and know about some of the TNO stuff. I talk about him because he's basically the center of the whole community and more or less fostered the cancer therein.

Originally TNO began as a forum roleplaying game on the now defunct Facepunch forums, and I helped run this first iteration of the game in 2014. Panzer joined around that time and was so thrilled about a game where Hitler wins ww2 that he started developing a mod for it on Victoria 2 before switching to Hearts of Iron. He fancied himself a writer and a game developer (although he is neither), and wanted to develop something that would offer a deeper experience than the typical HOI game (which is mostly breaking the game to conquer the USSR as Latvia). This entailed having to make lots of new mechanics covering legislation, economics, social reforms, etc which were far beyond his capabilities to see to completion.

After switching development to HOI4 in 2016 the mod began picking up interest in the modding community and this is where the drama in earnest begins. From day 1 Panzer maintained that he wanted to control and direct the mod in its entirety, which meant that his word stood on every decision, and of course meant banning people he didn't like. By 2018 the mod had gotten huge with hundreds of contributors and inevitably cliques formed. The entire mod being full of meme ideologies and nations originates here as inevitably people discovered that they could make a russian statelet for some pet ideology (which eventually took over the mod). Another problem reared itself when the fame and attention went to Panzers head and he encouraged a cult of personality to develop around him, culminating with interviews in which you can audibly hear his cock getting sucked. He also became notorious for banning people that disagreed with him, although the jannies always had the problem of the mod attracting the wrong sorts of people (nazis, commies, other lunatics). Constant leaks of content and the mod itself happened to also cause drama.

Eventually things boiled over when Panzer discovered that about half the dev team had made a secret discord where they worked without his direction. A so called "Shadow council". Panzer responded in the most rational way one can do under these circumstances, in which he banned everyone concerned, kicked them off the dev team, and purged most of them. He also realized that the overly ambitious target set for the mod was unfeasible (not to mention that he got lazier) and he scaled things back until we were left with the current iteration of the mod, which almost exclusively deals with Russia, the Axis powers, and the USA. The mod was released officially a few months ago, in a greatly unfinished state. Panzer recently abandoned work on the mod entirely to begin work on Godherja (A crusader kings mod he will likely also abandon). As for Panzer himself, he's been running a failed twitch streaming career:

https://knockout.chat/thread/17839/1

Despite his cult of personality it has failed to translate into actual material success, since he ended up homeless for a time. Perhaps making 5 hour streams where you watch Vaush give his stupid views on politics isn't very interesting to people.

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

www.youtube.com

Speaking of Vaush, he reportedly helped advise Panzer on some political aspects of the mod. As to why Panzer insisted on giving Reinhard Heydrich (the literal architect of the Holocaust) a redemption path, perhaps Vaush wasn't as influential as hoped. It's unusual, but a lot of nazis in this mod seem to be portrayed sympathetically...

 

[Big Brown Schlub]

and all of Romania's content was removed because the guy working on it was discovered in a plot to overthrow Panzer with other devs (who were ratted out by another dev who wanted to gain more influence with Panzer).

lol those spergs are even playing an IRL game of CK2, or well an extremely online version of it at least

 

[ConfederateIrishman]

The Japanese invasion of China was extraordinarily brutal so extreme violence makes sense in that context, though it may have been written poorly. Turning Mountbatten into a cannibal and having him rampage through 1960s India decades after he went home is just plain retarded and was so bad that the same people who approved Germany draining the Mediterranean and turning southern Europe into a desert thought it was a bit much.

Yeah, I am not saying the extreme violence is inaccurate, my point is that when it does show up the event writers almost seem... enthusiastic/gleeful about writing it.

I can contribute a few things, I've known Pinkpanzer for about 7-8 years now and know about some of the TNO stuff. I talk about him because he's basically the center of the whole community and more or less fostered the cancer therein.

Originally TNO began as a forum roleplaying game on the now defunct Facepunch forums, and I helped run this first iteration of the game in 2014. Panzer joined around that time and was so thrilled about a game where Hitler wins ww2 that he started developing a mod for it on Victoria 2 before switching to Hearts of Iron. He fancied himself a writer and a game developer (although he is neither), and wanted to develop something that would offer a deeper experience than the typical HOI game (which is mostly breaking the game to conquer the USSR as Latvia). This entailed having to make lots of new mechanics covering legislation, economics, social reforms, etc which were far beyond his capabilities to see to completion.

After switching development to HOI4 in 2016 the mod began picking up interest in the modding community and this is where the drama in earnest begins. From day 1 Panzer maintained that he wanted to control and direct the mod in its entirety, which meant that his word stood on every decision, and of course meant banning people he didn't like. By 2018 the mod had gotten huge with hundreds of contributors and inevitably cliques formed. The entire mod being full of meme ideologies and nations originates here as inevitably people discovered that they could make a russian statelet for some pet ideology (which eventually took over the mod). Another problem reared itself when the fame and attention went to Panzers head and he encouraged a cult of personality to develop around him, culminating with interviews in which you can audibly hear his cock getting sucked. He also became notorious for banning people that disagreed with him, although the jannies always had the problem of the mod attracting the wrong sorts of people (nazis, commies, other lunatics). Constant leaks of content and the mod itself happened to also cause drama.

Eventually things boiled over when Panzer discovered that about half the dev team had made a secret discord where they worked without his direction. A so called "Shadow council". Panzer responded in the most rational way one can do under these circumstances, in which he banned everyone concerned, kicked them off the dev team, and purged most of them. He also realized that the overly ambitious target set for the mod was unfeasible (not to mention that he got lazier) and he scaled things back until we were left with the current iteration of the mod, which almost exclusively deals with Russia, the Axis powers, and the USA. The mod was released officially a few months ago, in a greatly unfinished state. Panzer recently abandoned work on the mod entirely to begin work on Godherja (A crusader kings mod he will likely also abandon). As for Panzer himself, he's been running a failed twitch streaming career:

https://knockout.chat/thread/17839/1

Despite his cult of personality it has failed to translate into actual material success, since he ended up homeless for a time. Perhaps making 5 hour streams where you watch Vaush give his stupid views on politics isn't very interesting to people.

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

www.youtube.com

Speaking of Vaush, he reportedly helped advise Panzer on some political aspects of the mod. As to why Panzer insisted on giving Reinhard Heydrich (the literal architect of the Holocaust) a redemption path, perhaps Vaush wasn't as influential as hoped. It's unusual, but a lot of nazis in this mod seem to be portrayed sympathetically...

Yep, this is all completely accurate; The "shadow council" is what I was referring to when I mentioned how the Romanian content got purged.

 

[Pointless Pedant]

I can contribute a few things, I've known Pinkpanzer for about 7-8 years now and know about some of the TNO stuff. I talk about him because he's basically the center of the whole community and more or less fostered the cancer therein.

Originally TNO began as a forum roleplaying game on the now defunct Facepunch forums, and I helped run this first iteration of the game in 2014. Panzer joined around that time and was so thrilled about a game where Hitler wins ww2 that he started developing a mod for it on Victoria 2 before switching to Hearts of Iron. He fancied himself a writer and a game developer (although he is neither), and wanted to develop something that would offer a deeper experience than the typical HOI game (which is mostly breaking the game to conquer the USSR as Latvia). This entailed having to make lots of new mechanics covering legislation, economics, social reforms, etc which were far beyond his capabilities to see to completion.

After switching development to HOI4 in 2016 the mod began picking up interest in the modding community and this is where the drama in earnest begins. From day 1 Panzer maintained that he wanted to control and direct the mod in its entirety, which meant that his word stood on every decision, and of course meant banning people he didn't like. By 2018 the mod had gotten huge with hundreds of contributors and inevitably cliques formed. The entire mod being full of meme ideologies and nations originates here as inevitably people discovered that they could make a russian statelet for some pet ideology (which eventually took over the mod). Another problem reared itself when the fame and attention went to Panzers head and he encouraged a cult of personality to develop around him, culminating with interviews in which you can audibly hear his cock getting sucked. He also became notorious for banning people that disagreed with him, although the jannies always had the problem of the mod attracting the wrong sorts of people (nazis, commies, other lunatics). Constant leaks of content and the mod itself happened to also cause drama.

Eventually things boiled over when Panzer discovered that about half the dev team had made a secret discord where they worked without his direction. A so called "Shadow council". Panzer responded in the most rational way one can do under these circumstances, in which he banned everyone concerned, kicked them off the dev team, and purged most of them. He also realized that the overly ambitious target set for the mod was unfeasible (not to mention that he got lazier) and he scaled things back until we were left with the current iteration of the mod, which almost exclusively deals with Russia, the Axis powers, and the USA. The mod was released officially a few months ago, in a greatly unfinished state. Panzer recently abandoned work on the mod entirely to begin work on Godherja (A crusader kings mod he will likely also abandon). As for Panzer himself, he's been running a failed twitch streaming career:

https://knockout.chat/thread/17839/1

Despite his cult of personality it has failed to translate into actual material success, since he ended up homeless for a time. Perhaps making 5 hour streams where you watch Vaush give his stupid views on politics isn't very interesting to people.

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

www.youtube.com

Speaking of Vaush, he reportedly helped advise Panzer on some political aspects of the mod. As to why Panzer insisted on giving Reinhard Heydrich (the literal architect of the Holocaust) a redemption path, perhaps Vaush wasn't as influential as hoped. It's unusual, but a lot of nazis in this mod seem to be portrayed sympathetically...

Do you know if there's any truth to rumours of anyone on the mod team being attracted to minors?

Heydrich gets a bizarre treatment in the mod. While he was a vicious Nazi in real life, he understood that rulers fundamentally had to offer the people something to stay in power and so offered increased pensions and benefits in Bohemia if people cooperated with his rule. Having him collapse Germany and kill himself is warping his character beyond recognition. A realistic Heydrich would attempt to pacify the German population by offering certain concessions in social policy while destroying any significant dissent. Also he would never have taken orders from Himmler, who was considered a horrorcow even by the standards of the NSDAP.

 

[Imperial Citizen]

I approve of this thread; Even if there is not enough autism in TNO itself for a full thread, the entire community is absolutely full of lolcows across the entire political spectrum: From extremists who think their mod will increase their fringe ideology's popularity to centrists who overdose on smug and proceed to purge everyone they personally consider an extremist (to the point they start trying to secretly bait out crypto-extremists in their discords/reddit page/etc).

Pink Panzer himself is also a fun story because he was a former Stormfront guy who felt so guilty for his past views he took the Vaush-pill to try and atone.

Panzer being a former Stormfront guy actually makes some sense in hindsight, nobody but someone who was around those extremists would be able to make a game about them.

I think that all of the autism and edgy extremism seen in the TNO subreddit is a reaction to the absurdism of the mod itself. The mod is designed to be a hellish depiction of a world in which the axis powers win ww2 and set up a cold war with the U.S. and where a positive ending is global nuclear war which wipes the slate clean. The premise is both realistic (in terms of presenting the impracticality of fascism with the collapse of the nazi's slave economy) and absurd (anarcho-communist Russia, SS State of Burgundy, a Yockey or Hall America). People go all in and act ridiculous because the mod itself is ridiculous.

I feel like you see this to some extent with other mods such as Kaiserreich, but again not as much because those mods do not have such an amount of extremist content in comparison to TNO.

From my own playthroughs, while TNO does have a leftist slant to it, for instance, the term LGBTQ used when a more era appropriate term could be used, I believe there are more negative outcomes for leftist political groups in-game. The Siberian Black Army can often go from libertarian socialist to authoritarian socialist, Gus Hall's elimination of the FBI and CIA severely harms America's chances to win the Cold War, and the DSR's violence fucks up Speer's attempts at reform. The point of the mod is that the world where the nazis win is shit and that batshit radicalism fucks it up even more.

 

[ConfederateIrishman]

lol those spergs are even playing an IRL game of CK2, or well an extremely online version of it at least

Believe me, the irony in how he ran his mod under a de facto fuhrerprinzip system is not lost on me.

 

[Pointless Pedant]

Panzer being a former Stormfront guy actually makes some sense in hindsight, nobody but someone who was around those extremists would be able to make a game about them.

I think that all of the autism and edgy extremism seen in the TNO subreddit is a reaction to the absurdism of the mod itself. The mod is designed to be a hellish depiction of a world in which the axis powers win ww2 and set up a cold war with the U.S. and where a positive ending is global nuclear war which wipes the slate clean. The premise is both realistic (in terms of presenting the impracticality of fascism with the collapse of the nazi's slave economy) and absurd (anarcho-communist Russia, SS State of Burgundy, a Yockey or Hall America). People go all in and act ridiculous because the mod itself is ridiculous.

I feel like you see this to some extent with other mods such as Kaiserreich, but again not as much because those mods do not have such an amount of extremist content in comparison to TNO.

From my own playthroughs, while TNO does have a leftist slant to it, for instance, the term LGBTQ used when a more era appropriate term could be used, I believe there are more negative outcomes for leftist political groups in-game. The Siberian Black Army can often go from libertarian socialist to authoritarian socialist, Gus Hall's elimination of the FBI and CIA severely harms America's chances to win the Cold War, and the DSR's violence fucks up Speer's attempts at reform. The point of the mod is that the world where the nazis win is shit and that batshit radicalism fucks it up even more.

The Nazi slave system failing is realistic, but a lot of other aspects like the Atlantropa project and Japan seizing ports from the USA definitely aren't. It's an odd mod in that the Axis get an absolutely ludicrous buff to win the war (especially Japan, whose industry was pitiful compared to the USA's, and Italy, who go from useless bums to ruling a vast empire), and then collapse while anarcho-communism can survive later. I agree that some of the authoritarian socialists end badly, especially the DSR going nuts and Gus Hall who's trying to somehow turn the USA Stalinist, but the fact that anarcho-anything can take over the whole of Russia is itself a bias. If anarcho-capitalism existed in the game I would call it equally silly.

One particular nonsense is the small town of Magadan, which even today has only 93,000 people but can apparently take over the whole of eastern Siberia in game.

 

[Gay Scientologist]

Do you know if there's any truth to rumours of anyone on the mod team being attracted to minors?

Heydrich gets a bizarre treatment in the mod. While he was a vicious Nazi in real life, he understood that rulers fundamentally had to offer the people something to stay in power and so offered increased pensions and benefits in Bohemia if people cooperated with his rule. Having him collapse Germany and kill himself is warping his character beyond recognition. A realistic Heydrich would attempt to pacify the German population by offering certain concessions in social policy while destroying any significant dissent. Also he would never have taken orders from Himmler, who was considered a lolcow even by the standards of the NSDAP.

I don't know about the mod team having people attracted to minors but it wouldn't surprise me.

Panzer being a former Stormfront guy actually makes some sense in hindsight, nobody but someone who was around those extremists would be able to make a game about them.

I think that all of the autism and edgy extremism seen in the TNO subreddit is a reaction to the absurdism of the mod itself. The mod is designed to be a hellish depiction of a world in which the axis powers win ww2 and set up a cold war with the U.S. and where a positive ending is global nuclear war which wipes the slate clean. The premise is both realistic (in terms of presenting the impracticality of fascism with the collapse of the nazi's slave economy) and absurd (anarcho-communist Russia, SS State of Burgundy, a Yockey or Hall America). People go all in and act ridiculous because the mod itself is ridiculous.

I feel like you see this to some extent with other mods such as Kaiserreich, but again not as much because those mods do not have such an amount of extremist content in comparison to TNO.

From my own playthroughs, while TNO does have a leftist slant to it, for instance, the term LGBTQ used when a more era appropriate term could be used, I believe there are more negative outcomes for leftist political groups in-game. The Siberian Black Army can often go from libertarian socialist to authoritarian socialist, Gus Hall's elimination of the FBI and CIA severely harms America's chances to win the Cold War, and the DSR's violence fucks up Speer's attempts at reform. The point of the mod is that the world where the nazis win is shit and that batshit radicalism fucks it up even more.

I think the mods main failing is the fact it never really established where it wants to be. It's a mixture of ludricious insanity on the one hand, but on the other you have people (Panzer most of all) who consider it a serious work of art with a poignant and important message to tell.

The problem of course with trying to say that the Nazis are bad in this mod is that the bulk of the content in it actively encourages players to make funny memes about their favourite nazi or talk about how X nazi was actually a good guy. Speer is portrayed as some kind of pussy who feels remorse for the holocaust and runs the German economy. Speer in real life meanwhile was a mediocre bureacrat who bullshitted Hitler about how important his work was to the Reich, and a war criminal who bullshitted at Nuremberg how he knew nothing about the holocaust and wasn't an actual nazi despite being literally photographed at concentration camps directing slave labour. Plenty of people get a treatment like this ingame so they often end up completely different to the historical reality.

The mod in general runs into this problem where it fails as a written work, it fails as a game with lots of stuff to do, it fails to be serious, and it fails to be fun, and that's because it tries to be everything at once.

 

[Pointless Pedant]

I don't know about the mod team having people attracted to minors but it wouldn't surprise me.


I think the mods main failing is the fact it never really established where it wants to be. It's a mixture of ludricious insanity on the one hand, but on the other you have people (Panzer most of all) who consider it a serious work of art with a poignant and important message to tell.

The problem of course with trying to say that the Nazis are bad in this mod is that the bulk of the content in it actively encourages players to make funny memes about their favourite nazi or talk about how X nazi was actually a good guy. Speer is portrayed as some kind of pussy who feels remorse for the holocaust and runs the German economy. Speer in real life meanwhile was a mediocre bureacrat who bullshitted Hitler about how important his work was to the Reich, and a war criminal who bullshitted at Nuremberg how he knew nothing about the holocaust and wasn't an actual nazi despite being literally photographed at concentration camps directing slave labour. Plenty of people get a treatment like this ingame so they often end up completely different to the historical reality.

The mod in general runs into this problem where it fails as a written work, it fails as a game with lots of stuff to do, it fails to be serious, and it fails to be fun, and that's because it tries to be everything at once.

Speer does go full Nazi in the mod eventually, but he has the moderate "gang of 4" moderating him. I agree though that his character is badly written and he should be explicitly portrayed as a Nazi from the start, co-opting the student movements to support him but never having any intention of showing real remorse. Having him as a schemer and bullshit artist would suit his real character much better and make him more entertaining to play, too.

I'm tempted to write some kind of novel with a "fixed" TNO setting with the Nazis with their real historical characters and none of the dumb shit like Atlantropa (which is both unrealistic and makes the map look horrible) or anarcho-communists rampaging across Russia. Zhukov in charge of the USSR remnant still makes sense.

 

[Captain Fitzbattleaxe]

Right.

I guess I could talk about the absolute shadow the hedgehog-edge tier content they had in the mod than quietly removed. Such as the entirety of the India.
View attachment 1762011
So one of the paths they cut was where Lord Mountbatten rises up in the Indian anarchy (if their civil war goes on too long), proceeds to lead his force of literal cannibal Anglos to reconquer India.

I'll just quote the direct event file localizations:





This is why I can't really take the dev's call for sanity seriously when can you dig into the files and find constant events like this.

Honestly, I would love to play as anarchistic cannibals. That sound infinity more fun than every other "alt-history" mod out there.

 

[Fuck Y'all]

Honestly, I would love to play as anarchistic cannibals. That sound infinity more fun than every other "alt-history" mod out there.

the most wacky shit in HOI4 mods is homofascist-accelerationist france in Red Flood at this moment

 

[ConfederateIrishman]

Honestly, I would love to play as anarchistic cannibals. That sound infinity more fun than every other "alt-history" mod out there.

Yeah, but that is the problem; The mod can't decide it if it is telling a serious story about the dangers of Nazism vs a Wacky 4-way cold war mod full of fun memes. They ended up a mixture of both, which is how you end up with the community the way it is.

 

[Big Brown Schlub]

Yeah, but that is the problem; The mod can't decide it if it is telling a serious story about the dangers of Nazism vs a Wacky 4-way cold war mod full of fun memes. They ended up a mixture of both, which is how you end up with the community the way it is.

I do wonder what the mod team for After the End for CK2 is like because again it has some serious elements regarding what life in America would be if there was an apocalyptic event and people went back to feudalism, but then it just has wacky shit like a guy called Shaggy who through events gets other characters from Scooby Doo as his courtiers, Minnesota being populated by a bunch of Asatru spergs who based their Nordic religion on the Minnesota Vikings and in Florida you have Mickey "The Mouse" from house Waltney whose biggest rival is a guy who read the Quran and created his own version of Islam based on the Aladdin ride in Disneyland Orlando or whatever. Those are just the wackiest elements I remembered off the top of my head.
They're probably just as dysfunctional as TNO especially since it's been taken over by a different mod team since the original creator couldn't be fucked to work on it anymore.

 

[Pointless Pedant]

Honestly, I would love to play as anarchistic cannibals. That sound infinity more fun than every other "alt-history" mod out there.

They exist in real life too (there were instances of starving Japanese troops eating prisoners in WW2 and plenty of cannibal warlords in the Congo Wars, Papua New Guinea, ancient Fiji, and the Liberian Civil War), but they run into the obvious problem that no one wants to be ruled by cannibals, so they don't get very far. I'd be happy to represent them as a bunch of maniacs who get thwarted as soon as they meet serious opposition, but there are good reasons that those factions lost the wars they were involved in eventually.

There could be a crazy cannibal tribe in an Indian civil war, but they would be weak, lose, and not be led by Lord Mountbatten of all people.