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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Yo turk, do you really think it's worth my time to edit the 1d4chan site whatever the hell that is? It's not me, and that's not my IP
 
I'm actually fine with trap paths. If you look at our cold war the Khmer Rouge path ended catastrophically for Cambodia and the "escalate the Cuban Missile Crisis" path wouldn't have been good for anyone. Acting like a sociopathic, reckless ass has consequences. The problem with TNO is that certain paths that should end horribly, like anarcho-communism, are instead described as near-utopian. Germany does have a way to survive with fascist Speer, but it's fine to represent the "Burgundian system" as a non-functional government since that would fail in a few years.
There's a difference between giving the player a difficult scenario where making the wrong economic and diplomatic decisions can overwhelm them, and having a focus tree path that has your nation collapse without your input
 
lol, even on reddit people realize the south african war don't really work as vietnam analogy, since you can easly win and seens strange hippies would complain about fighting literal nazis.
Massive conventional wars in the age of nuclear missiles are dumb and don't work. TNO devs don't understand this and turn the Vietnam analogue into a conventional campaign over open plains.

Even worse are the plans for some massive conventional war between Japan and China in the 1970s, like that wouldn't just go nuclear at once. I think these people have to be sat down and explained to what irregular warfare is.
 
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Massive conventional wars in the age of nuclear missiles are dumb and don't work. TNO devs don't understand this and turn the Vietnam analogue into a conventional campaign over open plains.

Even worse are the plans for some massive conventional war between Japan and China in the 1970s, like that wouldn't just go nuclear at once. I think these people have to be sat down and explained to what irregular warfare is.
The thing about that is that HOI4 is absolute garbage at depicting irregular warfare
 
Massive conventional wars in the age of nuclear missiles are dumb and don't work. TNO devs don't understand this and turn the Vietnam analogue into a conventional campaign over open plains.

Even worse are the plans for some massive conventional war between Japan and China in the 1970s, like that wouldn't just go nuclear at once. I think these people have to be sat down and explained to what irregular warfare is.
Someone did ask about how nukes would work in the Great Asian War in the subreddit a while ago. Apparently, Japan will only threaten to use nukes if China steps foot in Korea or in core Japanese territory like Taiwan. By that point, China has 'won' in the sense that they kicked the Japanese out of most of Asia.

But... What's stopping Japan from threatening to use nukes as soon as the Chinese rebel?

When Long Yun rebels, it makes sense since that is more or less Gao's problem and usually Long Yun gets dealt with by China itself in a year or two. But as soon as China rebels in the GAW, the Japs can easily just vaporize a city or two to show them who's boss.

I don't think it's ever stated China can get nukes in their rearmament, though I could be wrong. But really the whole GAW feels like an obligation by the devs to give the player some sort of war to play around with ("See guys! We're not a Visual Novel we have wars too!") so they aren't only reading events of Lesbian couples or whatever when playing the mod.
 
Someone did ask about how nukes would work in the Great Asian War in the subreddit a while ago. Apparently, Japan will only threaten to use nukes if China steps foot in Korea or in core Japanese territory like Taiwan. By that point, China has 'won' in the sense that they kicked the Japanese out of most of Asia.

But... What's stopping Japan from threatening to use nukes as soon as the Chinese rebel?

When Long Yun rebels, it makes sense since that is more or less Gao's problem and usually Long Yun gets dealt with by China itself in a year or two. But as soon as China rebels in the GAW, the Japs can easily just vaporize a city or two to show them who's boss.

I don't think it's ever stated China can get nukes in their rearmament, though I could be wrong. But really the whole GAW feels like an obligation by the devs to give the player some sort of war to play around with ("See guys! We're not a Visual Novel we have wars too!") so they aren't only reading events of Lesbian couples or whatever when playing the mod.
I think it's the same problem of being completely unable to represent irregular warfare. China would of course resist occupation in a similar manner to Vietnam, but since the mod makes no effort to represent that they end up with a big dumb anachronistic conventional war that makes absolutely no sense at all. It's South Africa writ large.

If these people coded Vietnam, it would be an all out conventional invasion of the south by the north and the Americans would just storm into Ha Noi with a couple of helicopter divisions and establish an unstable client state. Nukes weren't used because it wasn't a conventional/total war to start with and communist powers were helping the north, but massive scale conventional warfare is a very different story.

What's even worse is that apparently this great Asian war is deadlier than WW2 and yet no one just gets nuked to rubble and China "wins" the mass slaughter. The absolute deadliest wars in a cold war proxy scenario should cap out at 5 million or so (the 1996-2003 Congo war was about this). Anything much bigger than that would just kick off WMD use like MacArthur wanted to do in Korea.
 
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I think it's the same problem of being completely unable to represent irregular warfare. China would of course resist occupation in a similar manner to Vietnam, but since the mod makes no effort to represent that they end up with a big dumb anachronistic conventional war that makes absolutely no sense at all. It's South Africa writ large.

If these people coded Vietnam, it would be an all out conventional invasion of the south by the north and the Americans would just storm into Ha Noi with a couple of helicopter divisions and establish an unstable client state. Nukes weren't used because it wasn't a conventional/total war to start with and communist powers were helping the north, but massive scale conventional warfare is a very different story.

What's even worse is that apparently this great Asian war is deadlier than WW2 and yet no one just gets nuked to rubble and China "wins" the mass slaughter.
The North actually did invade the south by conventional warfare in 1968. What was preventing the US from marching into Hanoi wasn't nukes, but fear of another Korean war with China crossing the border if the US marched into North Viet Nam
 
The North actually did invade the south by conventional warfare in 1968. What was preventing the US from marching into Hanoi wasn't nukes, but fear of another Korean war with China crossing the border if the US marched into North Viet Nam
Semi-conventional in 1968, fully in 1972 and 1975, but those were only phases of the conflict and happened years after Johnson's 1964 escalation. You're right that fear of another Korea stopped an invasion of the north (though the difficulty of controlling and occupying even more territory was also a factor), but at any rate it wasn't mostly conventional and if China or the USSR had got involved directly then nuclear use could have been a possibility.

An analogue in TNO would be if South Africa was irregular for the first 4 years and then flared up into a conventional phase later. None of these proxy battles could be won with a couple of helicopter divisions alone.
 
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new video from slackjawed on atlantica
edit: I'd recommend archiving Slackjawed's videos if that hasn't already been happening in this thread; from what he's said in the description of this one, he's being targeted and it wouldn't surprise me if his channel got hit because of this.
Here's a download in case it gets taken down.
 
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On the interview recording Cass is claiming to be illegal/in violation of PA wiretapping law:
US federal law on this is one-party consent; however, some states, notably Pennsylvania, where Cass lives, and California, where Discord is headquartered, have two-party consent laws. From my research, even if the recording was made in a one-party consent state, the wiretapping laws of both it and PA would most likely apply.
I'm no expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems like the recording unfortunately might be illegal, although the ruling I found might only apply to CA.
 
I complained about some of the outlandish focus trees which were released in the base game, especially since these were at the expense of AI improvements, adding food as a resource, POW/slavery mechanics, accurately balancing factories, adding any sort of parliamentary or senate system, or market economies for non-totalitarian nations. All of these things would actually affect the major powers most people probably want to play rather than giving ludicrous fantasy paths for Bulgaria or Turkey or other countries which made little to no impact on the war. Victoria 2 did some of these things to some extent and also had a 100 year timescale in which it's a bit more understandable that a small country could get big (see Prussia 1836 to German Empire 1871, over a few decades). Great power Sweden might even have been possible over a century, though absolutely not world conquest. I'm concerned that in the years since Victoria 2 Paradox seems to have got worse, not better.
Victoria is shitty now due to its lack of moddability - MEIOU and Taxes is, at this point, a better economic simulation - but Paradox has definitely gone to shit and is just chasing meme money. Each series has jumped the shark one way or another. CK2 jumped it with LOL SATANIST MURDER-INCEST, HOI4 jumped it with LOL BASED CENTRAL POWERS MONARCHISM, and EU4 didn't really jump the shark as such but it started pimping special content for each nation instead of building good fundamentals for all the nations.

Was the cold war boring though? An enormous amount happened despite the USA and USSR never launching ludicrous conventional naval invasions of each other. Going the other way and pandering to extremist (in this case ancom) fantasy is what the TNO team did with stuff like Sablin and the Siberian black army and it's awful, whereas the stuff that more resembles actual cold war content like crises between the superpowers and intelligence operations is more tolerable. And yet we have people here arguing that the real autism is removing the ability for extremists to project their irredentist power fantasies onto the game, when that's what makes the HOI4 community so dreadful in the first place.
The Cold War is one of the two most fascinating periods of history, the other being the Victorian Era. But you cannot make a good Cold War game as a HOI4 mod. A Cold War game has to be like Victoria but with HOI4-style warfare. It has to have robust economics, politics, and diplomacy, because you'll be spending 90% of your time negotiating with other countries, spreading influence, and developing, not fighting. Most of the fighting is counterinsurgency, not something you can actively participate in much.

Atlantropa is portrayed as a complete disaster that fucks over Italy and Turkey economically because it makes many of their ports useless in exchange for a bunch of salt flats that are about as productive as the remnants of the Aral Sea today. The issue is still that Atlantropa is completely retarded and unworkable with 20th century technology but the Nazis do it anyway because lol Nazis. It seems like an attempt at a 'take that' to the Nazi superscience trope but it falls flat because it's in something that claims to be grounded like TNO instead of something like Wolfenstein, it's something you'd expect a 2150s Reich to try, not a 1950s one. There's better ways to show the hubris of the Nazis like having their space program or Welthaupstadt Germania end up being an expensive failure but they wanted the spectacle of 'lol Nazis tried to dam up the Mediterranean but obviously it failed because they're stupid Nazis amirite?'
The big irony is that Atlantropa was a retarded globalist idea and I can see the Soviets (in a Soviets-win-Cold-War scenario) doing it way more than I can see the Nazis doing it, given the long Soviet history of self-destructive environmental/industrial disasters and the progressive associations of the project.
 
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