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Lustful Man Hugs posted:In KR, there are points in the game where you get a ton of choices that affect slider positions. It's possible that we just haven't reached that point yet. There aren't any more for the CSA that I know of, but Chief did say he was modding in some things. You get to adjust your sliders yourself, but that's only once every two years, and there are a few random events that let you move them, but I'm not sure if those fire for dictatorships (Which the CSA isn't, though according to the hard coding it is).
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Feb 5, 2015 15:49
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Kavak posted:Considering how unfree our slider situation is getting and the lack of warmongering on the part of Japan and Germany, I'm starting to think we're becoming the villains, just like every other Paradox Mega LP. Revolutionary socialism considers capitalism to be in and of itself warmongering. Marx didn't think major social change would be brought around through sunshine and hugs.
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Feb 5, 2015 16:29
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Kavak posted:There aren't any more for the CSA that I know of There should be some more actually as Reed is still alive.
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Feb 5, 2015 16:50
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Raskolnikov38 posted:There should be some more actually as Reed is still alive. Unfortunately, none of the events related to that affect the freedom slider, just democratic.
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Feb 5, 2015 16:57
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You mean the closed society/open society stuff?
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Feb 5, 2015 17:15
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John Charity Spring posted:You mean the closed society/open society stuff? Yeah, that's what it's called in the game files, sorry.
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Feb 5, 2015 17:17
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Kavak posted:The Syndicate Guards is a stupid name. Once the reclamation of our rightful territory is over and done with, can we rename it something normal like the American Red Army or Combined Syndicates Army? I honestly like Syndicate Guards but it doesn't really fit a professional army. Maybe once all the militia are gone, I'll think of something new. Drone posted:I imagine post-revolution CSA would be clamping down fairly hard on dissent and whatnot in order to cement control over a country that just came out of a 6-way civil war. I'm running on the assumption that Chief Savage Man is likely keeping it pretty authoritarian just for the sake of making gameplay easier and that society goes back to being open and free after a brief rebuilding period. The matrix of Dem/Auth and Left/Right that defines your government type doesn't really fit the KR universe in my opinion. If I went to max democracy and max left, I would become a Social Democrat government, which to me is a capitalist state with lots of welfare programs, pro labor and socially liberal policies. The type of radically different economic democracy that we find in the Internationale is represented in the Radical Socialist and Syndicalist bracket which lies between 4 and 7 (or 3 and 6, I can't ever remember how the numbers work) on the Dem/Auth slider if you're max left. Below that we turn into social democrats and above that we become Totalists. Since we're tacking to more of a French-style syndicalist program, I want our government type to remain Syndicalist, which means I'll basically be always be on the Authoritarian half of the slider. In narrative terms, I figure that our freedom in declaring war comes from Reed's immense popularity which gives him a lot of leeway in how he acts, as well as the imminent threat posed by the Canadians providing impetus to act. I'm sure ten years after the big wars are over, the workers would require a lot more convincing for a foreign war. I know that Social Liberal in the vanilla game would mark you as the good guy, given that the other choices are such highly regarded personalities as Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. It's the right attitude to regard the western Allies as the 'good guys' in World War 2, but the very non-democratic empires of the democracies and things like internment and the Bengal famine just go to show how depressingly relative the concept of good and evil on the world stage really is. Germany and Japan might not be fascist but Japan is probably still throwing Korean nationalists into jail and Germany still benefits heavily from what is effectively a slave state in Mittelafrika as well as the exploitation of China through the AOG. Even though I'm regarding the Internationale as the good guys here, Paris is still playing a realpolitik game in its ties with the left but still colonialist Netherlands and the totalitarian and repressive Soviet regime. So I'm not buying into Auth/Dem as a representation of how 'good' we are since the World War 2 paradigm of totalitarian versus democratic gives way to capitalist versus socialist in Kaiserreich. It's why I have to sort of laugh at those who say Kaiserreich is much more dark than our own history. We don't have genocidal maniacs ruling a continent here (well except for glorious Mongolia) and there's only a chance that socialism takes on a totalitarian bent. It only seems that way because we don't have the familiar liberal democracies to latch onto. Kavak posted:There aren't any more for the CSA that I know of, but Chief did say he was modding in some things. You get to adjust your sliders yourself, but that's only once every two years, and there are a few random events that let you move them, but I'm not sure if those fire for dictatorships (Which the CSA isn't, though according to the hard coding it is). The main event to set our sliders was the Boiling Point one in the last chapter of Act One, which lets us side with Trade Unionist (British path), Syndicalist (French path) or Totalist (Soviet path) and I chose the syndicalist one. The one slider that I do find relevant is Open/Closed society, which I figure dictates how much repression and restriction on free speech there is. Like Drone said, I can imagine the CSA being willing to roll over some dissidents in the name of the greater program. I'm not going to write a story about how Saint Reed and the Combined Syndicates led America to glorious and perfect socialism, because I don't want to be the leftist version of 'well you see Hitler got couped and the whole world prospered under the benevolent guidance of the German race' and because that kind of political fan-fiction isn't interesting to me (though this is still very much political fan-fiction). I will say that we are looking back at this period from the twenty first century as if it were a historical event, and as you can tell from the sources used so far, there's a good deal of freedom of speech and movement in the current society. You're all free to imagine it any way you'd like, but the way I'm imagining the history of this fake state is that there were scars from the revolution and a great deal of upheaval surrounding race and gender issues that caused problems in the decades in between the revolution and the present day, even if the anti-racism and feminism of the Internationale does do a lot to improve the situation. I also don't want to write a story about the entire society because it is too much work. 
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Feb 5, 2015 17:27
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Great post. I'll still defend the description of the Kaiserreich world as "dark" if for no other reason that it's natural to see it that way from the point of view of someone who grew up and was educated in a Western liberal democracy ... naturally we look for similarities to our own world, and when those similarities are nonexistent, we tend to think "man, the world really did go to poo poo in this timeline, didn't it?" The only countries in the Kaiserreich world of 1936 that resemble their real-world counterparts are the United States and Japan. While the Japanese AI can theoretically become anything it wants, it most often remains on the same railroad that real-life Japan was in. And the United States, the only true "democracy" in the same vein as we would think of them today, goes through a massive civil war in the game's second year and usually comes out quite different. In my mind, part of what makes Kaiserreich awesome is that it emphasizes the existence of shades of grey. There is no clear-cut good guy in Kaiserreich, as there is no clear-cut bad guy (with Mongolia and Mittelafrika probably excepted). The Entente and Mitteleuropa are two sides of the same coin: strong conservative monarchies with only the trappings of democracy, two old and decaying empires continuing to rival with each other over who dies off first; the Internationale on the other hand has the benefit of at least being ostensibly made up of governments by and for the common man, who generally faces oppression in the Entente or Mitteleuropa, while also being more warlike and aggressive. The Entente and Mitteleuropa rivalry feels so real in Kaiserreich because it directly reflects the realities of World War 1, where there is a strong argument to be made that -both- sides were the bad guy (which is also one of the reasons WW1 is so often overlooked in American education -- even though it was the first war in which the US really asserted its power as a global force, it also lacks the romantic good versus evil appeal of WW2). Drone fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Feb 5, 2015 |
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Feb 5, 2015 17:41
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I'm including myself in the group I'm laughing at because I first played the KR mod when it was for HoI2 at a time when I was politically centrist. I did regard it as a pretty bad world (also because I didn't bother to really learn anything about syndicalism so I regarded the Internationale as basically Stalinist). I've shifted my views a whole lot since but I definitely get the reaction. Kaiserreich: Incisive Political Commentary
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Feb 5, 2015 17:48
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Chief Savage Man posted:Big rear end post about KR I basically agree with all of this, especially about the sliders. As for KR as dark, as best as I can tell civil liberties are not going to come as fast and as well as they did in real life for many countries, but it'll still trend upwards as time goes on, and for most nations there won't be as high a cost in blood and suffering, so it kind of evens out on depending on your perspective. Honestly, the key theme of Kaiserreich for me has always been instability- every faction has equal potential for tyranny and liberty, and every country can change its regime for better or worse. This is a world in chaos, and the order that emerges could be nightmarish or utopian depending on how the dice roll. I also have my own personal "canon" outcome in my head that is probably way too happy and moderate to be realistic, but when you're one of the developers you can make things happen 
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Feb 5, 2015 17:58
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I think KR is a darker timeline because there is or can be significantly more war than in our own history. Seriously, civil wars are either in progress or can occur in: the US, Britain, Spain, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Romania, Russia, and China. The worst case KR-world (totalitarian socialists vs nationalist germans vs fascist russians vs expanisionist japanese and mongolians and oh god) is horrifying compared to the best possible KR-world (democratic socialists vs benign monarchy).
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Feb 5, 2015 18:27
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There could've been a lot more and bloodier wars in real history as well.
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Feb 5, 2015 18:37
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Kavak posted:There could've been a lot more and bloodier wars in real history as well. But there weren't, so any world in which they happened would not be "real history"
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Feb 5, 2015 18:46
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QuoProQuid posted:But there weren't, so any world in which they happened would not be "real history" Something like 80 million people (civilians and military) died between 1937 and 1945 as a result of war.
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Feb 5, 2015 18:55
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Drone posted:Something like 80 million people (civilians and military) died between 1937 and 1945 as a result of war. Sorry, I wasn't clear. Kavak said that any potential scenario in Kaiserreich is in equal standing with real history, because in real life there could have been just as bloody conflicts. However, because these conflicts did not occur they are, by definition, not real history. If we're going to talk about how much better/worse Kaiserreich is to real life, then you can only talk about what actually happened, not what might have happened. I think that there are a few outcomes in Kaiserreich that are definitely better than real life and many that are incredibly more monstrous.
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Feb 5, 2015 19:07
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There is a kind of bizarre mix of alt history and historical determinism in KR. How on earth do you propose to compare the relative brutality of a fictional war to a real one? How would you compare the relative rapidity in civil rights movements? All I see is a different kind of utopian thinking.
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Feb 5, 2015 19:17
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rakovsky maybe posted:I think KR is a darker timeline because there is or can be significantly more war than in our own history. Seriously, civil wars are either in progress or can occur in: the US, Britain, Spain, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Romania, Russia, and China. The worst case KR-world (totalitarian socialists vs nationalist germans vs fascist russians vs expanisionist japanese and mongolians and oh god) is horrifying compared to the best possible KR-world (democratic socialists vs benign monarchy). Apart from the USA every single one of those places was ravaged by war in real life though?? (I think there is like a .001% chance of AI UOB having a civil war)
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Feb 5, 2015 19:41
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Chief Savage Man posted:I honestly like Syndicate Guards but it doesn't really fit a professional army. Maybe once all the militia are gone, I'll think of something new. This is an excellent post. I also don't particularly see much worrisome about the CSA being a closed society when it's still in the throes of revolution; especially considering it's just fought an ideological civil war. It's inconceivable that it would be any other way for as long as possibility of counter-revolution exists.
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Feb 5, 2015 20:29
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Also, I've only ever seen KR in LP-form since I don't have DH, but I assume that in KR-world all of these huge global wars aren't also paired with vicious industrialized genocide, which makes it rather less dark than our own history right off the bat.
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Feb 5, 2015 20:32
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I think the game does have some mention of Goering's Mittelafrika setting up concentration camps but there's no holocaust equivalent as far as I know.
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Feb 5, 2015 20:40
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Rincewind posted:Also, I've only ever seen KR in LP-form since I don't have DH, but I assume that in KR-world all of these huge global wars aren't also paired with vicious industrialized genocide, which makes it rather less dark than our own history right off the bat. I feel like a lot of that is sorta sanitized simply cause you're playing a game, at the end of the day. There's precious little reference to the holocaust in Hearts of Iron (and I am definitely not pushing for there to be,) and I imagine the same might kinda hold true for KR - atrocities simply happen behind the screen of game mechanics and events. It would take a storyteller, in a format like this, to really flesh that sort of thing out - and honestly, who would want to think up their own alternate history genocide, or a slew of monarchist purges in French occupied Germany, political death squads marching around second Civil War era United States wiping out whole towns who don't agree with them... Erwin the German fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Feb 5, 2015 |
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Feb 5, 2015 21:03
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Basically, I think of KR as more of a moral equalizer between the three factions in HoI. The Allies (now the Entente) are still the liberal democrats we know and love, but they are slightly reactionary and revanchist due to their struggles with various international threats, so they have a distinctly more noticeable dark streak to them (remember that - as mentioned - the historical WWII Allies were either colonial states or struggling with institutional racism at various levels of government, but these things are more noticeable now that the anti-socialist governments of France and the UK are based in said colonies). As opposed to the Comintern, we now have the Internationale. Still lefties beyond a shadow of a doubt, but less authoritarian than Stalin (particularly if you stick with Syndicalism as opposed to switching over to Totalism). Because the Internationale is legitimately a confederation of multiple nations, this timeline is left without the paradox of all communists being equal, but the Kremlin are more equal than others. You get the sense that national liberation and anti-colonialism are earnest desires off the ruling entities in the Internationale. Finally, we have Mitteleuropa. Similar to the comparison between the Internationale and Comintern, these guys can get pretty bad, but even at their worst they're nowhere close to their real life Axis counterparts. Most of these guys have functioning democratic institutions of some sort, and their primary sin seems to be being mildly conservative and authoritarian. I can't exactly say that makes them the bad guys since that describes - y'know - almost every society in the history of the planet. Basically, the bad guys get a lot better and the good guys become slightly worse (as far as you can actually have good and bad guys in history, at least).
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Feb 5, 2015 21:05
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Erwin the German posted:I feel like a lot of that is sorta sanitized simply cause you're playing a game, at the end of the day. There's precious little reference to the holocaust in Hearts of Iron (and I am definitely not pushing for there to be,) and I imagine the same might kinda hold true for KR - atrocities simply happen behind the screen of game mechanics and events. It would take a storyteller, in a format like this, to really flesh that sort of thing out - and honestly, who would want to think up their own alternate history genocide, or a slew of monarchist purges in French occupied Germany, political death squads marching around second Civil War era United States wiping out whole towns who don't agree with them... There actually are events in KR for atrocities and the like, from anti-semitic violence in French North Africa to various 'Terror' events for factions that have civil wars. There's an event chain for the Dominican Republic massacring Haitians, and the aforementioned concentration camps in Mittelafrika. But no holocaust. HOI2 and vanilla Darkest Hour certainly gloss over the atrocities (except for the Rape of Nanking) in the interest of making the game as much about the nitty-gritty of fighting the war as possible, but KR doesn't take the same approach in general. John Charity Spring fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Feb 5, 2015 |
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Feb 5, 2015 21:09
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John Charity Spring posted:There actually are events in KR for atrocities and the like, from anti-semitic violence in French North Africa to various 'Terror' events for factions that have civil wars. There's an event chain for the Dominican Republic massacring Haitians, and the aforementioned concentration camps in Mittelafrika. But no holocaust. Ah, I stand corrected, then. Unfortunately.
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Feb 5, 2015 21:22
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John Charity Spring posted:There's an event chain for the Dominican Republic massacring Haitians Just want to say that this event chain happened in real life. Though it was just the massacre with the US then helping Haiti get some reparations from the the Domican Republic.
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Feb 5, 2015 21:35
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Chief Savage Man posted:I also don't want to write a story about the entire society because it is too much work. You know for anyone wanting such a story, I could post a link. There is a rather well written piece about such a scenario. Kavak posted:I basically agree with all of this, especially about the sliders. Also about bad guys in Kaisereich, are people here not forgetting that Georgia Has Beria in charge? Serial rapists are bad guys. Crowsbeak fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Feb 5, 2015 |
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Feb 5, 2015 21:42
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I feel like the main reason you don't see a horrible genocide a la reality is that KR is a game about making a realistic alt-history WW2. If KR had some additional horrible genocide involved, then I don't think Paradox would be cool with allowing them to host their mod on their forum. You got to remember that KR is community-based, and Paradox doesn't allow you to post the swastika on their forum, even in historical photos of the Third Reich. If you really are hankering for a good ol' fashion genocide, then gawddamn, mod your own events in and simulate one .
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Feb 5, 2015 21:48
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Trying to say whether the KR world is better or worse than ours is a bit silly because the KR world is not a single, known series of events like our history, it's an open-ended and highly variable scenario that can be wildly different when the game is over. The Entente can have reasonably progressive and democratic powers in charge, who are committed to liberating Europe because they genuinely believe it to be oppressed and in need of a restoration of liberal democracy. Or they can treat their populations as chattel for the industrial and military machines needed to conquer free, progressive societies for little reason except wounded pride. Mitteleuropa can be a coalition of cautiously progressive democracies who are gradually enfranchising women and solving issues with their minorities, or a country that exploits entire continents for resources and is led by old-school Prussian authoritarians. Russia can be a vicious reactionary junta, a constitutional monarchy that successfully navigates the country's vast problems, a democratically elected Soviet state, or a viciously repressive soviet society that Stalin would be proud of. Japan can be the same brutish empire as they were in our history, or they can lead an increasingly equal federation of East Asian countries towards self-determination and a rejection of European imperialism. This is true for just about every country in the game. So you can end up with a world of cruel dictatorships led by megalomaniacs or a broadly equal set of peaceful countries who accord their citizens significant protections and rights. Whether it's better or worse than OTL is up to the rolls of the dice and to the player of a given game.
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Feb 5, 2015 22:39
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It's a game about relatively constant revolution and ideologies, there's a lot of genocide from internal disputes alone. Just play Russia and revel in 20 bombing/murder/whatever events a year. There are plenty of civil war, with the side you want most to win usually getting curbstomped, there's implications. You don't need to go outright and say it all the time.
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Feb 5, 2015 22:40
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I don't think having Social Democracy as the Left Democratic max is bad in this universe. We didn't have the betrayal by the SPD, people would probably cling to that term (rather than Democratic Socialism these days).
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Feb 5, 2015 23:22
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A White Guy posted:I feel like the main reason you don't see a horrible genocide a la reality is that KR is a game about making a realistic alt-history WW2. If KR had some additional horrible genocide involved, then I don't think Paradox would be cool with allowing them to host their mod on their forum. You got to remember that KR is community-based, and Paradox doesn't allow you to post the swastika on their forum, even in historical photos of the Third Reich. Paradox absolutely would not be cool with that. The rules thread specifically says: quote:Additionally, the following rules apply for this forum: Nothing I've seen in KR makes me think that there is anything like the Holocaust happening, but there's plenty of other terrible poo poo that was done in the real-life colonial empires and totalitarian states that might be worse in KR. Mittelafrika being led by Goering, for example. I see a lot more opportunities for atrocities like slavery, deliberate and unintentional famines, and many disorganized campaigns of ethnic cleansing, than I do for methodical and systematic genocide as in the Holocaust. Nobody seems like they would do that in Kaiserreich.
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Feb 6, 2015 01:10
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VostokProgram posted:Paradox absolutely would not be cool with that. The rules thread specifically says: I could see a full reactionary Russia under Wrengel trying. Plus the mad baron.
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Feb 6, 2015 01:26
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This talk of the different possibilities has got me thinking, how do you go about reforming Mittelafrika? I only ever saw it once in a game I was playing but it looked like they'd undergone a revolution of some type and I only vaguely remember it being Syndie. I'd like to play something resembling a good guy in Africa but I doubt Nationalist France fits the bill.
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Feb 6, 2015 01:30
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If anything I can see Goering's Africa drowning in blood and the later days of the American Union State leading to systematic genocide a la Turtledove. Not to mention the death-worshiper in charge of Mongolia.
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Feb 6, 2015 01:41
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ArchRanger posted:This talk of the different possibilities has got me thinking, how do you go about reforming Mittelafrika? I only ever saw it once in a game I was playing but it looked like they'd undergone a revolution of some type and I only vaguely remember it being Syndie. I'd like to play something resembling a good guy in Africa but I doubt Nationalist France fits the bill. It looks like Portugal has to complain when they demand Angola, then Germany makes Göring resign and if they pick the leftist replacement he can go syndicalist. Lots of random events for three nations and some are unlikely. edit: I think you can go non apartheid as South Africa too. I think I've seen AI South Africa in the Internationale. James Garfield fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Feb 6, 2015 |
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Feb 6, 2015 01:46
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James Garfield posted:It looks like Portugal has to complain when they demand Angola, then Germany makes Göring resign and if they pick the leftist replacement he can go syndicalist. Lots of random events for three nations and some are unlikely. Yeah, South Africa can go Syndicalist (there are events for an ANC rebellion, and possibly a peaceful path, I forget).
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Feb 6, 2015 03:02
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South Africa ended up syndicalist without the intervention of the Internationale in my test game.
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Feb 6, 2015 04:03
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The greatest thing about South Africa I saw was when I was playing a Commune of France game, SA went syndicalist, requested entry into the Internationale, I granted it, and right after that they went "NO NEVER MIND WE CHANGED OUR MIND" and left again. It was so loving stupid that it ended up being brilliant.
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Feb 6, 2015 04:07
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TheMcD posted:The greatest thing about South Africa I saw was when I was playing a Commune of France game, SA went syndicalist, requested entry into the Internationale, I granted it, and right after that they went "NO NEVER MIND WE CHANGED OUR MIND" and left again. It was so loving stupid that it ended up being brilliant. "Hooray for the Internationale! ...Wait, we have to provide military support? Uh. How about we just provide moral support instead?"
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Feb 6, 2015 04:10
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TheMcD posted:It was so loving stupid that it ended up being brilliant. Kaiserreich in a nutshell.
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Feb 6, 2015 04:10
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