It’s alright. I still like Millennium Dawn more back when it was in it’s peak, but basically the mod-team turned out…questionable and the game went to complete shit. But, I will give this game that it has more story, written bits and some genuinely decent planning.

It heavily, heavily dabbles in “Schizo conspiracy” shit. Bogdanoff twins/IMF, Davos, etc. Some of these ideologues are popular on and I’ve seen most of the information about them from your famous basket-weaving forums (4ch/8ch/sharty). The weird part is they always have a kernel of truth in them…example being the IMF being a global financial group of western interests dedicated to upholding capitalism and exploiting/extracting from the global periphery. Instead of considering that it’s the combined might and interests of capital, it must be physic twins that secretly wrote the matrix and controls the global financial trade to make “Bogdangrad” on Mars and benevolently ruling France. Somehow Jews are usually involved in your usual drivel, but in this game they do a pretty good job of avoiding that groyper nonsense that usually accompanies your schizo politics. If you know your online history, though, you know exactly what the events “imply”. I will say that the schizo goes hard with the European nation-paths. America is slightly more…sensible. Germany is fucking insane.

With that out of the way and me not wanting to elaborate anymore on schizo theories, the combat in the game is what pisses me the fuck off. CAS is a nightmare, with some of the provincial maps/state maps a convoluted fuck-mess of models overlapping each other to the point where L.A is micro-management hell. The COVID mechanic is awful and there’s a lot of minor nations with absolutely zero content that is apart of some pretty major events in the game. Just take a look at california or new york when “the fire rises”.

Why do M4’s have air suppression? Is every soldier a DayZ player shooting down helicopters with their M1911s? This doesn’t sound crazy until you have a stack of soldiers with AA guns and the 40,000 troops with .5 air suppression start stacking real hard. For comedic value I picture like some Red Alert shit where a horde of clustered soldiers start shooting in the air at a target.

Why did Trump start a political revolution in the midwest? That’s probably the worst possible fucking place you can start your “revolution”. “Oh hey guys, do you wanna go fight in open, flat plains against the combined air-force of Biden?” There’s a reason New York was called the “Empire State” and he’d have a significant amount of support in parts of it. Or Virginia. Or even Florida. Why the fuck Indiana? (think the start point has been changed for trump now)

Music does rock, I am fond of the “new age radical” aesthetic as much as it’s been coopted by the right. Great lore.

I have yet to play China or in Asia yet, but I have yet to hear any complaints either. Might give it a go and report back.

My only major, game-breaking complaint is that I can’t have Trump have a political awakening. There should be an option for Trump to snap and randomly go communist or Al-Gore environmentalist. I genuinely want a “come to jesus” moment except with Trump realizing the only way forward is the working-class revolution and that the only way to keep his standard of life for his family, his future and his children is to embrace the ideals of Marxism-Leninism to shape the nation for something that will actually remember him. Would never happen, but would be funny as fuck and this mod is already schizo.

Any good political game needs both good leftist paths and Red Scare trope filled “tankie” vanguardist paths! I personally rather enjoy both!

https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=3350890356

https://thefireriseswiki.miraheze.org/wiki/The_Fire_Rises_Wiki

I haven’t played much of HOI4–still need to learn past the tutorial. This looks interesting and I want to try it now. I’ve been pirating Paradox games, which means to use mods from the Steam Workshop I rely on other sources or have to use a tool to directly download the mod (and if the newest available cracked game is older than the mod supports and there is no archive of older versions, you’re SOL). Thankfully this mod has other sources, but I wish they provided the source code.