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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It's also an absolute pain to micro through because the tiles are like three pixels wide and your map is covered with dudes standing on top of them. It's better than the vanilla 'cities are one tile that are slightly harder to fight in than forest' for simulation purposes but man clicking around those things is fucking infuriating. Of course, with all modded highly detailed maps you also inevitably have the occasional broken province that touches another but you can't move between them. Outside of that though some of the details are really nice though, like Crimea not just having a single, easy to block bottleneck.
I found it useful to create a larger cordon around the city, so rather than stacking up directly on the city tiles, move a few tiles away and surround it with a fallback line, the AI will be baited out, then I could slam a few armored/mechanized units into the city tiles and sweep up the remaining units. Only works once the frontline has moved on though. It was especially painful taking Milwaukee and Chicago during my trump campaign as they were on the frontline.

My last game was a Japanese run, and goddamn, the Chinese have hands in this mod, not sure how you're supposed to defend both Taiwan, Okinawa and the home islands.
 
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My last game was a Japanese run, and goddamn, the Chinese have hands in this mod, not sure how you're supposed to defend both Taiwan, Okinawa and the home islands.
Taiwan and Okinawa are a lost cause due to their proximity to the mainland and the fact that the chinese can spawn marines via decisions to gain a beachhead in the island as soon as the war starts. The Asian War works as a series of phases, and no matter the side (I played as China when I did the war, haven't played from Japan's side) I advice to first conquer the rest of Korea, and then mainland SEA. If you do that as Japan, you would have isolated any allies that the EADI may have on the islands, as well as link up with India, massively narrowing your frontlines, then you should attack Pakistan and the himalayan countries so that you have to only defend a few bottlenecks with poor supply for the chinks. Afterwards, you just have to endure
 
Imagine if the Bloods, Crips or any of the Motorcycle Clubs managed to somehow unify the country or even large areas lmao. Same with the Aryan Nations etc.. The idea that any of these factions could possibly come out on top is something that i am hoping gets explored more
iirc TFR's devs said that the gangs won't get any unique content, and are intended as speedbumps.
 
Saw in Red Dusk, one of the devs mentioned how Red World's Fan Fork had it's devs and members were complaining about TFR being a "Chud Mod" and having a right wing bias in it lmao.
Red World Fan Forks devs are center left shitlib globalist suckers that spend all day bitching about politics rather than work on their mod so this isn't surprising.
 
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I made a new TFR playthrough as PF and reunited America. I had mostly a lot of fun but the city fights were horrendous because every single major city has at least a dozend tiny tiles to retreat to. This also has the effect that the AI will have a dozend troops spread in the same 3 tiles, who will constantly retreat just to reenforce each other. I'd rather have the almost irrelevant modifiers from vanilla than this garbage.

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City fights have got to be the most pain in the ass thing when it comes to this mod. Spent a good bit trying to capture Los Angeles and New York during my playthrough.
 
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Look who's here (the worst part is that it isn't even an image, it's a gif)
 
I can only speak for myself, but I managed to steamroll the other civil war factions after I switched a good chunk of my infantry to 6 infantry and 2 artillery (wanted 3 but I didn't have enough arty). Infantry in tfr having anti tank also helps a lot.
Since most of the civil war factions’ military is militia and infantry, whoever equips their main fighting force with artillery the fastest is automatically top dog.
 
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The moment an artist releases a piece of work into the world, the artists intention stops meaning jack shit, its open for interpretation. How many times have we seen troons say "uhm, ackshually Fallout/Starship Troopers/King Kong/X is criticism of capitalism, you dont get to find it cool". Any piece of art that enables you to see a different world is dangerous, because functionally the concept of author's intent is completely irrelevant, and a certain minority is always bound to find it inspirational. It's just how art is, simple as.

I talked with the devs about this, and they didnt seem to be any more right wing than your everyday man. But they wanted, and I quote, "everyone to feel like the hero of their own story". Doesnt matter if its left or right. And precisely this neutrality makes it "chud coded" to the troons, unless you rub it in the player's face that nazis are bad every other second, you're complicit in reviving nazism. And if you played Atomwaffen, they perform human sacrifices and mass executions in their conquered territories and end up destroying the planet, I cant imagine how the troons twisted this into shilling for nazism.

Sorry for the spergout, give me the tophat stickers. I guess I should be happy the troons are mad, its just the sheer stupidity....if even TrooNO cant stop people from simping for Speer, what chance do the rest have.
It's great to hear the devs have that philosophy and have stuck with it. That's a solid anchor point for all their writing and the direction of the mod itself, even if there are some quality assurance problems with the writing. It's player-centric, not poli-centric. It's agency empowering

And this is exactly why TNO and other mods have gone off the rails. The same people who larp liberation freedom fighters for blah blah blah insert shit cause here; fucking HATE agency wherever they feel it threatens their political theology ideas. To the losers who have the time and lack of skills to loaf around in development hell for 6+ years on ONE mod, the mod space is a political space where you need a moralizing lecture on WHY THIS IS BAD. Fail to moralize properly in their preferred direction, and they pull out the good ol' Saul Alinsky handbook and try to purge the neutral spaces

To them it's not a story where you're roleplaying as a faction/nation, like a proper RPG (which is EXACTLY what HoI4 is at the end of the day, because it's sure as hell not a good strategy game). This is not conducive to good storytelling or writing in a setting where that's the meat and potatoes. You'd think people obsessed with "media literacy" would recognize this, but nope. Despite trying to turn the game into a CYOA visual novel, they have a horrible sense of human psychology and plot construction (which you NEED to be a good writer). And even worse, no respect for the choices anyone but them would make

Everyone sees themselves as their own protagonist who makes the choices they do because they believe it will benefit them or those they care about, even people you may consider evil. Fail to capture that, and you've robbed those characters of their agency and realism. You'll always fail to make the characters and the factions that are constituted of those characters interesting. Rob the characters a player is playing of their agency and interesting qualities, and you've lobotomized your story and made the experience grayscale

Want an example of a well written character who you can come to hate without arbitrary psychopathy or constant moral harping? Check out Leo Dan Brock from the Age of Madness series. A perfect case study in how a character being a cunt for believable reasons makes them more hateable and better villain material than 9000 sadistic super Satan Hitlers who are really mean to Jews because.... THEY JUST ARE BECAUSE THEY'RE A NAZI OK CHUD??!!?

To anyone interested in improving the quality of their writing, especially political-adjacent writing, George Orwell wrote a whole essay detailing why most political writing since the 20th century is just plain terrible and how you can improve


tl;dr troons and their allies are horrible writers (because they're narcissistic politispergs) and should give up writing. You will never be Marx, you are a canker on the field of game development and writing, kys
 
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Weird that Konata shows up there, it made sense when she shows up when playing as Japan but why Russia?
Idk. She started to show up yesterday, the same day that there was an small update for the mod, she was not there the day before. Maybe someone forgot to remove her from the files or put her where she doesn't belong
 
The Fire Rises has some good potential, and it can easily stand up as potentially "the most schizo hoi4 mod" along with red flood and TNO.

My only real gripe with the mod is how unfinished the American CIvil War is. You mean to tell me one of the biggest wars in the mod is missing 50% of its content? So many empty events especially if you do Joe Biden. If you haven't done the "American Caligula" path for Biden you should hold off on it. About literally 95% of content for that path isn't complete, with schizo focuses with no descriptions and blank events. I may have also broke it somehow, because when Barron Trump is supposed to rise up against me literally nothing happened.

IMO they should have had more content before they decided to release it, but its still an interesting mod regardless.

Do the devs plan on any post collapse Chinese content should they lose the GAW? Are they planning on letting Taiwan take over the mainland and reform the ROC?
 
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IMO they should have had more content before they decided to release it, but its still an interesting mod regardless.
IIRC the reason the mod is the way it is simply comes down to the fact that they wanted to actually release the mod sooner rather than later, in order to prevent the fate of many toozer mods, no release ever. I for one would rather take the mod in its current state than a more perfected version a number of years from now, if ever.

Do the devs plan on any post collapse Chinese content should they lose the GAW? Are they planning on letting Taiwan take over the mainland and reform the ROC?
Making a dynamic system for that, with either border wars or regular wars or maybe a mix, would be fairly easy to make so there's probably a submod in the near future.
 
Do the devs plan on any post collapse Chinese content should they lose the GAW? Are they planning on letting Taiwan take over the mainland and reform the ROC?
The devs have said what we have is only supposed to be the lead-up to the Third World War, which is pretty insane considering in some cases you have content until 2035. In a sense, they've already beaten TNO to TNO 2. Not that it was ever going to be real in the first place.

Right now it really feels like the actual heart of the mod content wise is Europe and Asia with the sheer length of paths compared to the ACW. It makes for incredible longplays, and the wars are incredible fun, but man it takes forever for my computer to go through it and it's a lot of waiting. The really annoying thing about Dark Brandon is that you have to have him decline while Trump is alive and destroying that entire country takes half? the time you need Biden to decline for. It's just more waiting in a Mod that at times is rife with it.
 
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