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The Hearts of Iron Megathread

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Dealing with several German Civil Wars at once does make a person get old.

Lord Vesporeon said:
Having one big bad nation pulling the strings around the world cheapens the idea, and fact, that Humanity needs no malevolent actor(s) to push us to doing bad things, and that the ultimate horror of all history, global thermonuclear war, if it comes, will be brought about not by a bunch of mustache twirling uber-evil people who literally hate everything good, but by people who range from deranged to genuinely good, all who think they are doing the right thing and who just want to ensure what they believe in prospers. It's not very comforting to think that a man like RFK or Schmidt is in fact a far bigger threat to Human civilisation than a mad recluse like Himmler, but it is eye-opening and I think it just works better for the various messages TNO tries to get across.
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You are entirely correct.

And frankly, in its gameplay TNO actually pretty much does do a good job of showing how the world can end itself without needing Himmler's mustache-twirling evil. Things often get shrimpy without Himmler's intervention. And this- the way that Burgundy's influence on the end of the world is actually very small- makes the Cringenstaat's plot armor feel all the more pointless, unececcesary, and undeserved.
 
New leak from TNO

Every single one of them can be coupled according to discord
 
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Regarding Himmler and the SS Order-State of Burgundy:

One of the really good things about the Heydrich path is that Himmler actually was the dangerous, world-ending threat he was supposed to be. Desperately trying to rally the German warlords into an anti-Himmler alliance was nail-biting because of how much was at stake...

...and it made it all the more satisfying when I got to read about Heydrich executing Himmler, and watching Himmler reduced to a screaming mess in the process.

Of course, there was the oddity that this was only able to happen because the player put Himmler in a position to enact his mad plans, by playing the Heydrich path in the first place.

Anyway, if "wanking Burgundy/Himmler/the SS" is a concern, then it seems to me that the devs have painted themselves into a corner by creating Ordernstaat Burgund in the first place, and doubly so by making it into a core part of the mod's identity.

Either Himmler fills his role as the Big Bad Sauron of the setting, providing a dangerous obstacle for the player to overcome...but you've "wanked" the SS as hyper-competent. Or you follow TNO's theme of "authoritarianism is doomed to collapse under it's own weight, choked by swallowing its own lies"...and Himmler becomes a really poor Big Bad Sauron figure.

Removing Burgundy from the mod altogether would nix the dilemma, but it might be questionable because - again - "funni nuke man" has become seen as a core part of the mod's identity. (Then again, Kaiserreich got rid of Genghis Khan 2.0, so who knows?)

I'm honestly not seeing a winning move here.
 
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Mechasaurian said:
Regarding Himmler and the SS Order-State of Burgundy:

One of the really good things about the Heydrich path is that Himmler actually was the dangerous, world-ending threat he was supposed to be. Desperately trying to rally the German warlords into an anti-Himmler alliance was nail-biting because of how much was at stake...

...and it made it all the more satisfying when I got to read about Heydrich executing Himmler, and watching Himmler reduced to a screaming mess in the process.

Of course, there was the oddity that this was only able to happen because the player put Himmler in a position to enact his mad plans, by playing the Heydrich path in the first place.

Anyway, if "wanking Burgundy/Himmler/the SS" is a concern, then it seems to me that the devs have painted themselves into a corner by creating Ordernstaat Burgund in the first place, and doubly so by making it into a core part of the mod's identity.

Either Himmler fills his role as the Big Bad Sauron of the setting, providing a dangerous obstacle for the player to overcome...but you've "wanked" the SS as hyper-competent. Or you follow TNO's theme of "authoritarianism is doomed to collapse under it's own weight, choked by swallowing its own lies"...and Himmler becomes a really poor Big Bad Sauron figure.

Removing Burgundy from the mod altogether would nix the dilemma, but it might be questionable because - again - "funni nuke man" has become seen as a core part of the mod's identity. (Then again, Kaiserreich got rid of Genghis Khan 2.0, so who knows?)

I'm honestly not seeing a winning move here.
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You could just put him in a place where ideologically, despite his state being an incoherent mess, Himmler has a lot of power and influence over Germany just because he has power and influence over the 'ideal' or at least an ability to play the game. So it'd be less about him being influential everywhere, and more about him being able to influence a single country in just the right way to potentially send it careening into nuclear self-destruction.

Maybe? Dunno for sure.
 
Mechasaurian said:
Either Himmler fills his role as the Big Bad Sauron of the setting, providing a dangerous obstacle for the player to overcome...but you've "wanked" the SS as hyper-competent. Or you follow TNO's theme of "authoritarianism is doomed to collapse under it's own weight, choked by swallowing its own lies"...and Himmler becomes a really poor Big Bad Sauron figure.
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Honestly, the second option... doesn't really seem like a problem? The world of TNO can fall to nuclear Armageddon entirely separately from his schemes as it is, it has plenty of people and forces that are perfectly capable of acting as the 'big bads' of narratives without having to stretch the SS into hypercompetence. Hiimmler himself can still be holed up in his faux-'State of the Order' in Belgium/eastern France and try to meddle in the German domain through the SS without having to be the Big Bad Sauron of the setting.
 
LordInsane said:
Honestly, the second option... doesn't really seem like a problem? The world of TNO can fall to nuclear Armageddon entirely separately from his schemes as it is, it has plenty of people and forces that are perfectly capable of acting as the 'big bads' of narratives without having to stretch the SS into hypercompetence. Hiimmler himself can still be holed up in his faux-'State of the Order' in Belgium/eastern France and try to meddle in the German domain through the SS without having to be the Big Bad Sauron of the setting.
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Yeah, one of my "nuke" ends was because the japanese fishing trawler sunk by the US...

An I was about to unify Russia with the Mercs, damn it.
 
God, the Winter War with the Divine Mandate of Siberia continues to be the worst fucking thing in existence, God do I just fucking hate it.
 
LordInsane said:
Honestly, the second option... doesn't really seem like a problem? The world of TNO can fall to nuclear Armageddon entirely separately from his schemes as it is, it has plenty of people and forces that are perfectly capable of acting as the 'big bads' of narratives without having to stretch the SS into hypercompetence. Hiimmler himself can still be holed up in his faux-'State of the Order' in Belgium/eastern France and try to meddle in the German domain through the SS without having to be the Big Bad Sauron of the setting.
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Well, all that would require is for the devs to do nothing and leave the mod as it is right now.

People say Burgundy is "wanked" because it has the "plot armour" of not collapsing outside of player control. But, for all his grand aspirations, Himmler has very little actual influence on the world. His attempt to assassinate Hiter fails and Hitler dies of natural causes anyway, meaning the German Civil War would have happened even if Himmler had done nothing. He can't really influence the actual nuclear powers, and is relegated to poking minor nations (which were unstable in the first place, so he all did was nudge them). And even then, his complex and convoluted plans can be derailed by said nations simply refusing to do their part.

And, even if Himmler seems to have gotten gud at the minigame of shuffling slaves around to prevent rebellion, he has built his entire system on a self-destructive base that is doomed to collapse eventually.
 
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Twiggierjet said:
I always see the AI only finish it in 1967-68.
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The Divine Mandate shouldn't have enough people to even be a country, but if it has to be, it shouldn't be be that military strong, but if it has to be, it shouldn't be strong enough to withstand having four capitols lost, but if it has to be, it shouldn't be over such a massively wide utterly unpopulated front.

The fact that the priest is just stoic when you capture him you don't even get the pleasure of getting rid of him is even more annoying.
 
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Sarissa said:
The Divine Mandate shouldn't have enough people to even be a country, but if it has to be, it shouldn't be be that military strong, but if it has to be, it shouldn't be strong enough to withstand having four capitols lost, but if it has to be, it shouldn't be over such a massively wide utterly unpopulated front.

The fact that the priest is just stoic when you capture him you don't even get the pleasure of getting rid of him is even more annoying.
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I mean, if you just grab his capital and the VP in the Kamchatka capital, he capitulates. Those are the only population centers he has and thus it aligns perfectly with his surrender limit. Don't chase the 1 VP provinces and you'll have a much easier time. Heck, you can usually leave the western front against him completely undefended because there is so little infrastructure there that his soldiers on that side can't grab anything important before you can capture his entire coastline, and thus enough VPs to make him capitulate. It's not really that hard as a player character, only as an AI.
 
myrkwise said:
Also, some insight into a potential Burgundy rework.
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That's good to hear. Burgundy is interesting and I'm fine with it existing, but it's execution leaves a bit to be desired. Himmler shouldn't have such total control over the country, given there's basically no support for the regime, internal or external. Invading France seems like a terrible idea when you think about it, since it's giving more land to the French SS. There should be a chance of them rebelling when the German Civil War hits, because Himmler's lost even the nominal support he had from Germany.

The SS Collaborators feel like they have more potential, honestly. The French SS waging war with the French State to conquer it is more interesting.

Lord Vesporeon said:
If you're referring to Burgundy than I'm sorry you feel that way but to be honest, I love it

Burgundy's, uh, existence, is the biggest issue I have with TNO. It completely draws me out of experience whenever I hover over to Western Europe to see what Germany, Italy, England, or Iberia is doing and I just see this black-purplish blot on the map and I just go "oh right, that thing..."

It both makes no sense from a rational/logical perspective but also, far more importantly in my opinion, from a narrative perspective. Having one big bad nation pulling the strings around the world cheapens the idea, and fact, that Humanity needs no malevolent actor(s) to push us to doing bad things, and that the ultimate horror of all history, global thermonuclear war, if it comes, will be brought about not by a bunch of mustache twirling uber-evil people who literally hate everything good, but by people who range from deranged to genuinely good, all who think they are doing the right thing and who just want to ensure what they believe in prospers. It's not very comforting to think that a man like RFK or Schmidt is in fact a far bigger threat to Human civilisation than a mad recluse like Himmler, but it is eye-opening and I think it just works better for the various messages TNO tries to get across.
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There's also the fact that there's no real diplomacy with Burgundy. It's a black hole in Europe that nobody acknowledges. It's a hermit kingdom, so I get that it's not sending people out, but it'd be nice if more than Switzerland said anything about them.
 
And so dusk approaches the New Order...

Completed a run as OMCK. That's yet another Bad End ticked off the list.







Really, the hardest part of an Omsk playthrough is avoiding political collapse before and during the regional unification stage. It can be surprisingly easy to forget to click the options to quell Batov's insurgency when they pop up, thus falling behind and falling to Batov.

Once you get past Batov, you are a goddamn steamroller. You can supplement your divisions with a bunch of free armoured vehicles even before unifying West Siberia, and after that you can create Tank-APC divisions that casually murderize everything in their path. Nothing was able to stop my armoured divisions from punching through enemy lines and either encircling or driving straight to Archangelsk. In East Siberia, the terrain was more of an obstacle than the enemy (which is sort of be expected since it's East Siberia).

I was mostly inured to Omsk's brutality by all the memes and spoilers that I had been exposed to, but there was one event that got to me.
It was the event about the National Reclamation Government's chemical and biological weapons program, and the chief of the project walked Yazov through the horrible Unit 731 stuff that they doing to helpless test subjects. Even Yazov was fazed by it, and so was I.
Turns out a nation that bases itself purely on revenge taken to genocidal extremes is messed up. Who knew?

It's too bad TNO2 - and the Great Trial which the Omsk route builds up for the entirety of its existence - is still a long way off. For the moment, I will just have to settle for this cool video:



I can't wait for the OMCK survivors to emerge from their bunkers after doomsday, to meet a bunch of friendly weirdos who think "Aryan" is just a fancy word for "human." :V
 
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Mechasaurian said:
It's too bad TNO2 - and the Great Trial which the Omsk route builds up for the entirety of its existence - is still a long way off. For the moment, I will just have to settle for this cool video:



I can't wait for the OMCK survivors to emerge from their bunkers after doomsday, to meet a bunch of friendly weirdos who think "Aryan" is just a fancy word for "human." :V
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That is good. Personally my favorite Omsk video is this one.

 
Having played as Omsk, I think the best part of the writing was around the end when Yazov finds out that Karbyshev (his mentor and father figure) actually killed himself, which amplifies the doubts that he's been having the whole time and leads to him adding a fourth thesis to the Black League's ideology as a way of self-justifying all the horrible things he's done and continues to do.
 
Jack Jack said:
Flora Hamburger is Rosa Luxembourg Southern Victory version right? Correct me if I wrong
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She starts as a really obvious Rosa expy but it gets derailed by the fact that Turtledove seems to have decided to not go with what's speculated to be his original plan of having the US lose the war and become Nazi Germany at the last minute, so she ends up surviving and becoming a conventional socdem Senator, iirc.
 
ChineseDrone said:
So the Rommel/Morrel thing was too much for this mod, but they're not doing anything about, *ahem*, "Flora Hamburger"? (I wonder who that could be????? Turtledove was, uh, not exactly a subtle writer)
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Morrell's birthdate lines up exactly with Rommel's while Flora's is 20 years after Rosa was born. That's the reason for the two being separate while Morrell is Rommel. That and we have other plans for Rosa, as you can see in the Reichstag decisions tab.
ChineseDrone said:
She starts as a really obvious Rosa expy but it gets derailed by the fact that Turtledove seems to have decided to not go with what's speculated to be his original plan of having the US lose the war and become Nazi Germany at the last minute, so she ends up surviving and becoming a conventional socdem Senator, iirc.
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This is correct, but Flora ends the series as a lowly Congresswoman (and former First Lady).
Jack Jack said:
Flora Hamburger is Rosa Luxembourg Southern Victory version right? Correct me if I wrong
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No, they're separate, unlike Morrell and Rommel.
 
Fun fact:

In my Taboritsky playthrough, I actually unified Russia after the clock struck Midnight.

Despite the horrible buffs, a lone division of foot soldiers managed to push their way through thick forests and into some city or other, and the East Siberia unifier capitulated just like that.

So, fittingly enough, Russia was finally reunified...by a corpse. :V
 
The challenge of creating Southern Victory mod in HOI 4 is Asia and South America because Turtledove doesn't tell enough about Asia and South America in the novel
 
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