Iron Ends – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

This is the back half of the last part (I, II IIIa, IIIb, IVa) of our series looking at the vision of history advanced by Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and one of the most popular strategy games on the market today.

In the front half of this part, we looked at how Hearts of Iron IV understands industry and production, the game’s economic model. On the one hand, the military production model is interestingly nuanced and complex and the decision to simplify the civilian half of the model, in light of the game’s focus, makes a fair bit of sense. On the other hand, the game stumbles quite badly in that it – mostly for reasons of balance (a desire to make Nazi Germany more likely to win than it was historically – constructs an economic world where discredited Nazi theories of economics which were quite decisively humiliated during the war itself are instead represented as right and true. HoI4‘s economic system (unintentionally) employs the tremendous persuasive power of simulation to create the appearance that the Nazis and fascists did make the trains run on time.

Industry is going to remain relevant in this part, where we’re going to talk about HoI4‘s conception of strategy and in particular strategic ends. Paradox games are deservedly famous for not featuring many explicit ‘win states’ and allowing the player to define victory. At the same time, different game systems still push players to think about ‘winning’ in different terms. To take an extreme example, few players are going to define a ‘victory condition’ to be something the game doesn’t even track or simulate.

Here again, HoI4 is a victim of its streamlining: it is mostly interesting in having World War II and profoundly uninterested in the implications of World War II. It exists, in many ways, in a world without strategic ends and the strategic ends it does track – military size and map painting, primarily – are, like so many of its other design choices, fundamentally the ‘victory markers’ that mattered most to the Axis powers and least to the Allies, especially the western allies. Hearts of Iron IV thus, in its careless streamlining adopts in its strategic ends – as with so many of its other systems – an unintentionally fascistic vision of history, one in which what really matters is purely military strength and the ability to dominate.

Finally, this being the conclusion, we’re going to ask what the implications for all of these choices across all four parts are. Hearts of Iron IV has a lot to recommend it – the operational simulator is very impressive – but also quite a few flaws. Most of all, viewing these flaws together, one cannot be surprised that this is a game with a serious Nazi problem. Of course any World War II game is going to attract that sort to some degree, but we can hardly be surprised if a game whose systems repeatedly, if unintentionally, adopt a fascist ideological position is going to have a particularly intense Nazi problem.

Hearts of Iron IV shows World War II as modern neo-Nazis like to pretend it was and so it is unsurprising that they are drawn to the game – albeit, we must note, alongside a great many players who are not ideological Nazis.

But first, if you like what you are reading here, please share it, as I rely on word of mouth to replenish my manpower pool after poorly considered post topics. If you really like it, you can support me, my academic work and my public writing, including this project on Patreon! I can’t promise to use your support to buy a division worth of tanks, but I also will not promise not to do that. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

What Is It Good For?

We should begin by discussing strategic ends. Countries in the real world do not wage wars (usually) simply because they like bashing their tanks and airplanes together the way a small child plays with toys (or a large child plays with Hearts of Iron), countries typically have aims they hope to achieve in war. In particular, leaders typically have a desired end state, an image in their mind of what the world is supposed to look like if they achieve all of their objectives in war. Now, war is a tricky thing that tends to get out of hand, so countries often struggle to achieve these sorts of clear end-states, often ending up with something rather different than what they had planned, even when they win.

But these end-states sit at the heart of strategy because all strategic planning is meaningless if you have no conception of what you are even trying to do and so one would expect any strategy game to pay fairly close attention to strategic ends. So it is worth discussing the strategic aims of the major powers in World War II – what were they trying to achieve – and the degree to which Hearts of Iron IV is able to model those outcomes and the factors which led to them.

But first we should acknowledge that Hearts of Iron IV actually has explicit scoring. When a game ends, a ‘playthrough overview’ screen pops up, presenting a ranked list of countries, with an overall score which is a product of the size of their armies, their navies and air forces. In practice, the calculation is very odd as this is effectively another dead mechanic – the air score generally overwhelms every other component of the calculation and relative scoring often makes little sense. In the screenshot below, Imperial Japan – on the verge of surrender, with the home islands having been invaded – ranks above the United States, actively in the process of invading the home islands.

While factory counts are listed on this screen, from the tooltip information, they don’t seem to have any impact on actual score. As far as I can tell, the end-game score system has been like this essentially since the game launched and it is such an infrequently used feature that it has never really been updated. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning here.

The other explicit system are the achievements and Hearts of Iron IV, like many Paradox games, has a lot of achievements (293 at current count) the player can earn. That said, achievements can only be obtained playing on ‘ironman’ mode (a single save file, so the player cannot go back and undo bad choices) and it is pretty clear from the achievement stats that very few players ever play ‘vanilla’ Hearts of Iron IV on ironman. The most common achievements are joining a faction (19% of players), researching Construction V (17%) and having 1000 convoys (17%) all of which are practically guaranteed to happen in most playthroughs, suggesting the total percentage of players to ever meaningfully engage with ironman and the achievement system is sub-20%.

The existing roster of achievements splits into basically two categories: a number of achievements for utilizing basic game mechanics and then the bulk of achievements which are about achieving specific things (in most cases, alternate-history things) as specific countries. Notably, very few of these achievements resemble the actual historical strategic end-states that the major powers were trying to achieve. Instead, most of the country specific achievements are, frankly, memes: a funny title to go with an unlikely outcome that is interesting either because of how absurd it is (‘Thai Fighters: as Siam have 10 aces’) or because achieving it is a demonstration of skill in the system because of how difficult or unlikely it is (‘I Didn’t Hear No Bell: As democratic Czechoslovakia, lose the Sudetenland, then grant autonomy to Slovakia, then defeat Germany’). There is a subset of players that pursue these, but very few of them are related to the historic strategic ends of the major players in WWII.

Finally, of course, there is map-painting. After all, like all of Paradox’s grand strategy games, Hearts of Iron IV is played on a gigantic world map, so it makes sense for players, looking to demonstrate or compare their success at the game, look to see who has painted as much of the map their country’s color. It is the most immediately perceptible outcome of effective gameplay and so one many players focus on. But, as we’ll see, while seizing or holding territory was obviously an important aim of many countries during WWII, it wasn’t the ultimate aim – no one was simply running armies around to engage in ‘map painting,’ they had goals that went beyond lines on a map.

So what were they? And can HoI4‘s systems model them?

Aims of the Axis

Broadly speaking, the Axis powers went to war with variations on the same basic strategic principle: they wanted to seize territory in order to access sufficient resources to enable a kind of ‘national greatness’ but also – as we’ve discussed – economic self-sufficiency (‘autarky’). The goal was thus not just map-painting for map-painting’s sake, but specific programs of conquest designed to secure specific resources in order to create a specific kind of state – a fully internally self-sufficient empire, based on racial hierarchies in all three cases.

The Nazi version of this approach is often encapsulated into the Nazi slogan Lebensraum (‘living space’), but it is important to be clear here that Lebensraum was about resources as much as territory. Had Hitler been offered the entirety of Antarctica or the Sahara Desert, this would not have qualified as Lebensraum. Instead, Hitler’s aim was about securing not just physical space but resources – critically, farmland – for an expanding (racially defined) German Volk. To some modern ears, the idea that the emphasis here was often on farmland of all things may seem strange, but recall that the Allied blockade of Germany during the First World War had inflicted significant suffering and demonstrated Germany’s lack of agricultural self-sufficiency. Moreover, the Nazi ideal – remember, this is a reactionary ideology – placed a fair bit of stock in the ideal of the (‘racially pure’) German farming family as the bedrock of the Volk.

Consequently, Nazi designs were directed towards seizing huge swaths of Eastern European territory – mostly for farmland (but also other resources) – and mass murdering or enslaving the existing inhabitants in order to replace them with German settler-colonists. The basic ideological foundations of these plans reach back into the pre-WWI period, but find clear expression in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925), so they are very early components of Nazi ideology. Perhaps the clearest (and most horrifying) vision of this end is in Generalplan Ost (‘General Plan East’), crafted in 1940 and 1941 in preparation for the invasion of the Soviet Union but building on earlier thinking. This plan – of which the Hunger Plan already mentioned was a component – proposed murdering tens of millions of Eastern Europeans in order to facilitate a mass program of German colonial settlement.

Italian fascists had their own vision of ‘living space’ – Spazio vitale in Italian. It envisaged both a campaign of settler colonization over the ‘small space’ (piccolo spazio) at the core of this new empire and then resource extraction from the ‘large space’ (grande spazio) of imperial dependencies. Once again, resources – viable agricultural land, raw materials and so on – were of core importance in defining the extent of this ‘living space.’ As with the German conception of Lebensraum, fascist Italy sought to conquer a region large enough to sustain an imperial state without trade, by creating a system of ethnic subjugation and resource extraction.

Japan’s conception of its war aims were only modestly different, albeit complicated by the fact that whereas Germany and Italy had singular leaders with singular ideologies, Japan’s belligerence was driven by competing factions within its government. Thus, for instance, the ignition of major war with China in 1937 was not the product of the central Japanese government but the actions of elements of the Kwantung Army. That said, the Japanese government backed these sorts of actions so I am going to take a view here, as it were, that ‘the purpose of a system is what it does.’ Thus, even if Japanese actions ‘bubbled up’ from junior officers or resulted from competition between the IJN and the IJA, the fact that Imperial Japan backed and justified those actions make them state polity. Viewed in that light, combined with the (sometimes retroactive) justifications, Imperial Japanese state policy is quite clear and, again, only modestly different from the other Axis powers.

Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” – the euphemistic label Japan applied to its empire – was primarily focused on resource extraction rather than colonial settlement. The Japanese home islands were densely populated and – by the standards of the time – highly developed, but relatively resource poor. Rather than trade for these resources or resettle the Japanese population en masse outside of Japan itself, the Japanese aim was to construct an empire (composed substantially out of puppet occupation governments) where the conquered populace would serve as an expendable labor force for the extraction of raw materials for Japan’s industry and a captive market for the finished goods Japan produced. The main difference here is that whereas the Nazis imagined an empire almost entirely of colonial settlement with very little resource-extraction-overlordship and the Italian fascists imagined an empire split between the two, Imperial Japan’s aims were almost entirely for resource-extraction-overlordship, with very little colonial settlement.

In all three cases, these aims were fundamentally economic more than territorial. The end goal was not ‘buffer states’ or a return to some past territory (even Italian aims included territory never ruled even by the Romans, such as Ethiopia), but rather an empire whose brutal extraction could sustain a certain standard of living for the ruling racial class through the subjugation or murder of other racial classes.

Which then leads us to…

The Aims of the Allies

The western allies (Britain, the countries of its Commonwealth, France and the United States, inter alia), entered the war primarily as status quo powers, with stated war aims – the disarming of the Axis and the dismantling of their empires – which largely aimed to return the world to something like the pre-war status quo. That said the way the war turned out mattered greatly to these powers in ways worth discussing.

Britain and France both entered the war as the victors of WWI, leading global great powers and with large colonial empires. After the war’s end, both countries would strive, fight and eventually fail to retain those empires and to defend their great power status. In a very real sense, then, Britain and France, while winning the war, fundamentally lost a grip on their long-term strategic aims. For France, it isn’t hard to see why – they were occupied during the way and the process of dismantling their empire, only partially reversed by the war’s end, began while France, as an occupied country, could do little to stop it.

For the British Empire, despite winning the war and never being occupied, the war fundamentally, fatally weakened an empire that was already (as we noted last time) beginning to slip away in any case. Some of these causes were ideological and political: as in World War I, the Commonwealth states having done their bit felt a renewed sense of pride and increasingly independent feelings. This, as an aside, is one of the only things here HoI4 actually models: war participation by colonial states pushes them towards independence, so a United Kingdom that finds itself unable to win the war except by leaning heavily on its empire finds that empire slipping away even faster for the effort.

What is missing here are the economic causes: the United Kingdom, by the end of WWII was economically exhausted. Winning the war had required suppressing consumer demand and turning the economy over to military production which is a fundamentally unproductive kind of production in that no one can eat bombs. The United Kingdom had begun rationing food supplies and other basic necessities (clothing, soap, fuel, etc) in 1939 and kept rationing some essentials as late as 1954 as the economy struggled to recover. British economic weakness – currency weakness and reliance on fuel imports, among other things – created the leverage that the United States (in part) used to force the British to back down during the Suez Crisis (1956), the event which effectively marked the end of Britain and France’s status as great powers.

Meanwhile, understandably, a country still under rationing, recovering from the economic devastation of the war and absolutely exhausted by it, was equally unwilling to summon the will to spend even more money and even more lived in a likely doomed effort to maintain its overseas empire by force.

Of course the United States stands as a stark contrast: military spending during the war functioned as a massive economic stimulus, while at the same time the United States suppressed consumer demand via rationing (for a shorter time and far less harshly) during the war, leading to a lot of households ending the war with money in their pockets because there had been money to be made during the war but nothing to spend it on. The result, famously, when the war ended was the economic boom of the 1940s and 1950s, which provided the economic muscle for the United States to act as one of the world’s two Cold War-era superpowers.

There is, of course, an irony that the country that ended up at war’s end with the highest standard of living wasn’t the one that had conquered any territory for resources, but the United States, which owed its renewed prosperity to domestic, internal economic factors as well as a gleeful enthusiasm for one of the things the Axis powers hated: trade.

The Soviet Union’s war aims are a bit harder to parse, in part because some of the claimed aims (the USSR promised to create independent new countries in Eastern Europe) were disingenuous (the Soviet Union instead produced puppet-states, disciplined with military force) and because the Soviet Union spent some time, effectively, on both sides of the conflict. Initially, the USSR used the war, in 1939 and 1940, as an opportunity for territorial expansion into Romania, Poland, the Baltic states and Finland, with both an ideological objective (expanding the Soviet model of Communism) and a geo-strategic one (establishing ‘buffer states’ protecting the Soviet core). After the war, those same aims appeared with the Soviet creation of a network of satellite states built on the Soviet model (with the threat of the Red Army to maintain it) in what would become the Warsaw Pact, while at the same time combined with a desire (shared by the western allies) to limit Germany’s ability to upset the global order again.

This set of Soviet objectives are also one of the few Hearts of Iron IV can really model, as it is possible to create ideologically pliable satellite states in the peace conference system, although because the game ends in 1948 (and in practice runs out most of its content by 1945) these states mostly exist as trophies rather than actually doing anything. That said, it doesn’t really model them well; notionally this effort was also supposed to make believers in the Soviet system out of Eastern Europe but as we’ve discussed before the game’s political model is far too simplistic to really capture or simulate that kind of shift in political opinion or consciousness and by the time it would matter the game has lost interest in any event.

What you may note, however, is that for a lot of the countries involved – the USSR is a partial exception but only a partial one – the overall strategic end-states (both desired and achieved) end up as fundamentally economic in nature, revolving around the standard of living that the post-war order could provide and the consequent tolerance of the population for further spending on expensive foreign political programs (the British Empire, the Marshall Plan, the Warsaw Pact, NATO, etc.).

Can Hearts of Iron IV simulate these aims? Broadly speaking, no. I’ve noted the few exceptions, but generally no. It can simulate the map painting component, but the underlying economic realities that the map-painting (or lack thereof) are supposed to produce, it is almost entirely incapable of even simulating, much less representing to the player, much less presenting as an end-state. The actual strategic aims of the major powers in WWII largely fall completely outside of Hearts of Iron IV‘s vision of history, a striking failing for a grand strategy game which cannot model the grand strategies of any of the great powers of the 1940s.

Empty Shelves

The main problem here is that nearly all of these war aims historically fed back into economic questions: the availability of resources, of agricultural land (‘living space’), of a trade-based, prosperity-inclined global order, the existence or absence of rationing and consumer goods and overall standard of living. For Germany and Italy, these were combined by what we might bloodlessly term demographic goals – the mass murder and enslavement of tens of millions of people in order to enable a program of mass agricultural resettlement of their lands.

But Hearts of Iron IV‘s economic system doesn’t simulate any of this feedback, making it impossible for the game to even model these strategic priorities – I want to repeat that, the game cannot model the strategic priorities of countries like Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom or the United States – much less present them to players as potential strategic end-states.

A major part of the problem is the underdeveloped civilian industrial system. As noted last week, Hearts of Iron IV ‘taxes’ each country a certain percentage of its factories to produce civilian consumer goods, a percentage which decreases as a country increases its economic mobilization law, which reflects war-time rationing leading to less domestic consumption. Notably, however, these consumer goods factories both consume no resources (besides the coal that everything does) and produce nothing.

So on the one hand, there is no point to engaging in military expansion to secure the resources for any kind of domestic industry except armaments production, because no kind of industry except armaments production actually uses raw resources as the game models them. Armies do conquest and conquest feeds armies but neither of these ever feed back into anything else. In terms of raw factory counts, raw resources – except for coal – are entirely superfluous to industrial expansion. So long as building slots exist, any country can happily keep plopping down civilian factories and infrastructure and never really face any kind of resource shortage.

Meanwhile, HoI4 does not simulate standard of living or the civilian supply of goods at all. The contrast with Europa Universalis V or Victoria II or III – where goods production feeds back both into state revenues but also into the goods available for consumption by pops and thus into stability and politics – is marked. In HoI4‘s economic system, consumer goods usage is simply modeled as waste: it does not result in economic growth, it does not influence politics and there is no standard of living mechanic for it to influence.

Of course historically, rationing – which is how you actually reduce the ‘consumer goods’ percentage of industry – mattered a lot. It was politically contentious in the democracies both during the war and (for Britain) in the years following. In most countries, the demands of the war meant that most luxuries vanished from stores fairly early on, while in many countries – particularly the Axis powers and the Soviet Union – the war’s demands meant that necessities were rationed tighter and tighter, until things like calorie allotments for civilians were truly parlous. It matters, as a historical matter, that the outcome of a war that was supposed to guarantee prosperity and plenty to specific racial groups instead delivered them want and starvation.

Meanwhile the game is likewise incapable of modeling the post-war situation either. Apart from Germany’s unique MEFO bills, the game doesn’t simulate the ways in which countries fought the war by effectively borrowing from the future – either by direct debt financing or by suppressing consumer demand to focus entirely on military production. There is no way, for instance, for the United Kingdom to rack up lend lease debt or end up in a situation at the end of the war where the historical massive Anglo-American loan was required simply to keep the British economy running as it transitioned away from military production (which in turn would also require Marshall Plan assistance).

Instead, as discussed last time, Hearts of Iron IV‘s economic simulation features spiraling, out-of-control growth because it treats consumer goods as a kind of waste that is reduced by war economies, leading to economies becoming more productive rather than less as a result of mobilization (the opposite of the thing that happened). As a result, it has no way of simulating France and Britain being effectively bankrupted by the war, nor of simulating the United States’ unique position as the one major world economy that hadn’t been blasted into rubble. Instead, everyone finishes the war with vastly larger economies than when they started.

The only major exception to this rule is Germany’s MEFO bills. Historically, MEFO bills were an economic gimmick created by Hjalmar Schacht to allow Germany to run an enormous deficit without that deficit showing up on the government’s balance sheet thus enabling massive fiscal stimulus (via rearmament) without a visible exploding debt, though of course the whole thing about the MEFO bills is that they would have to come due eventually (these were 6-month bills, but you could ‘kite’ them for a time by issuing more), but Germany went to war, initiating rationing and a government controlled economy (and then collapsed) first.

The game models this interaction, with MEFO bills giving a quick injection of economic production and suppressing the consumer goods percentage, but with a nasty hangover down the line. However the game provides an a-historical ‘out’ – the start of the war enables the MEFO Bills national spirit to be transformed into ‘Economy of Conquest’ which then can be modified via ‘Autarky Achieved’ directly into Wirtschaftswunder (the term for the post-war economic recovery in Austria and West Germany) once Germany has seized enough raw industrial resources, which resolves the issue.

The major problem with this interaction, from a ‘vision of history’ perspective, is that it presents as if the Nazis could have permanently dodged the economic costs of their war if only they had won, which is almost certainly untrue. Historically, the Nazis looted aggressively across their new European empire and never got out ahead of the massive obligations the state was incurring doing all of the war – instead, even as the Nazis pushed deep into Russia, civilian supplies and rationing had to be aggressively cut back. It was not, in fact, possible for the Third Reich to conquer its way out of bad economic decisions and the fact that Hearts of Iron IV creates an entire focus and event chain to pretend that it was is another way that it ends up – for game balance reasons (Germany has to be able to win!) – endorsing a false and fascist view of history and economics.

Had the Soviet Union collapsed early in 1943, Nazi Germany would still had been burdened with internal debts it could not pay, store shelves it could not stock and people it could not feed, which is a big part of why it was planning to starve more than forty million of those people to death simply to make the math begin to work. I honestly find it a bit offensive that the game uses the historical term Wirtschaftswunder for the end-state here, because it implies that butchery and conquest – if it had worked – could have been a shortcut to the kind of prosperity that West Germany achieved in the 1950s, but the historical Wirtschaftswunder was based on sound currency (something the Nazis did not do), trade and economic integration (something the Nazis hated) and financial assistance from the United States (something the Nazis would never get). It feels like a piece of historical economic stolen valor, to be frank, to give the name of a historical thing accomplished with the opposite methods and ideology of the Nazis as the result of implementing Nazi economics fully.

However, beyond this industrial policy, the game cannot really model fascist economics either. Because of the already-discussed policy of indifference to Nazi war crimes, the game has no way of modeling Nazi efforts to create Lebensraum in the East or the possible effects this would have had. Nazi industrial policy is presented as a workable plan to use conquest as a short-cut to the kind of economy modern Germany has – highly industrialized, based heavily on trade – rather than an insane plan to attempt to murder their way to prosperity through a program of agricultural expansion that I think it is fair to say was doomed to failure no matter what happened. Homesteading was not going to be the winning economic model of the 1950s.

The result is a game that is incapable of modeling the actual war aims and strategic ends of the major combatants in World War II, despite being a grand strategy game about World War II.

Will The Mods Save Us?

Before we can wrap this all up into a set of conclusions, we need to discuss the modding scene. Hearts of Iron IV is unusual as strategy games go because of the huge popularity of its mods, which range from small quality of life changes to massive total conversions which transport the game’s core structures into completely different settings. Something like two-thirds of Hearts of Iron IV players play with mods at least some of the time, though it is important to caveat that figure both that not every mod is a total conversion and also not every person running mods runs them all the time. Vanilla HoI4 is still the modal experience of HoI4, but the mod community is huge and a lot of players are running mods.

Can the mods fix Hearts of Iron IV? Kind of?

Most HoI4 mods are subscribed to through Steam’s Workshop feature, so we can get a decent view of the space here and I want to be clear that we’re really considering two separate things: the community of modders (who make the mods) and the community of mod-players. Here is, as I write this, the currently most subscribed mods on the workshop:

We have a few quality of life mods (Chinese localization, FPS Map, a peace conference system revision), a timeline expansion (The Road to 56), a mod that shifts the system earlier (The Great War) and later (Cold War Iron Curtain) and one alternate world total conversion (Old World Blues, set in the Fallout universe).

And then we have alternate-history What If Germany Won World War I? (Kaiserreich), and alternate-history What if Germany Won World War II? (The New Order) and Millenium Dawn, a modern day conversion to the game that got so popular with neo-Nazis that the creator – who is not a Nazi – had to burn down his own forums as the only way to get them out. Fully half of the top six mods for this game are ones that have – shall we say – unique appeal to Nazi-inclined gamers.

And that is the state of affairs, I must note, after Paradox Interactive actively purges the Workshop of openly Nazi mods.

Now, I want to be clear: is Kaiserreich a pro-Nazi mod? No, it is not. But in a crowded modding marketplace where most people only look at the titles, you would have to be a little daft not to recognize the bit of marketing work being done by a mod which overhauls basically the entire map calling itself Kaiserreich – and what it means for the community that this name was evidently the second best possible choice after “The Road to 56.”

Is The New Order a pro-Nazi mod? No, it is not; if anything it is more skeptical of the Nazi social, economic and political program than the base game, which is to say that it expresses any skepticism at all (and it does as does Kaiserreich). But do these mods have some obvious appeal to modern neo-Nazis? Yes, obviously. While it is the case that both Kaiserreich and TNO at this point have a ton of content for countries that are not Germany, it is also the case that they’re called Kaiserreich and The New Order: Last Days of Europe and that there are two alternate history ‘what if Germany won…’ mods in the top six mods (the 21st most popular, Thousand Week Reich, is also this). Before we get to any other country getting a focused alternate history, we also have to pass a mod named after the Nazi victory slogan (Endsieg; again, the mod is no more Nazi than Hearts of Iron but the appeal is obvious), to get to the first country-specific non-German overhaul, Pax Britannica (36th in popularity; ‘what if Britain but science fiction’), which has 12% of the subscribers that Kaiserreich does.

This is, I must stress, the situation with all the Nazi mods removed and their creators banned by Paradox as soon as they are noticed. In short, the Nazi problem in the Hearts of Iron IV modding scene is old and well-known.

I want to be clear here that I am not accusing the makers of these specific mods (as opposed to now-removed infamous Nazi mods like “Aryan Goddess” and “Deus Vult” (made by a guy calling himself TauronSS)) of being Nazis or fascists or friendly to Nazis or fascists. What I am pointing out is this is exactly the modding scene you would expect for a game that had a serious Nazi-bar problem, but also had the developers actively purging any openly pro-Nazi or pro-fascist modding content. You’d end up with the most popular stuff frequently being borderline material that isn’t pro-Nazi per-se but happens to focus on the elements that Nazi players want to focus on the most without breaching the modding rules.

If I may strain an analogy, if you walked into a store that sold key-chains with initials on them and realized looking at the shelf that they sell three times as many ‘SS’ keychains as any other letter combination, you would not rush to assume that it just so happens that everyone in town is named Simon Smith. You might even draw the conclusion that the store owner – despite not being named Simon Smith and professing that he didn’t like the Simon Smiths – nevertheless seemed a bit too comfortable making their keychains.

Of course real-world alternate history mods are not the only kind. As we’ve discussed, HoI4 has a remarkably good operational military model, one of the best out there. And there are any number of mods which take that operational model and transport it into a context where it is simply no longer expressing a theory of history at all – mods like Old World Blues (set in the Fallout universe) or Equestria at War (set, incredibly, in the My Little Pony universe). Those mods are really popular too (albeit generally not as much as the alt-history-Germany mods, make of that what you will), and there is certainly an argument that by transporting the game into an alternate world they ‘save’ the operational simulator by ditching the bad history it is freighted to in the base game.

What I think the mod scene signifies is the complex nature of the Hearts of Iron IV player-base. The joke I have heard is that the HoI4 player-base is effectively split three ways: one third are hardened Nazis, one third are History Dads and one third are purple-haired LGBTQ ultra-libs. I doubt those numbers are right, but it speaks to both the diversity of this player-base and also to its very awkward and quite visible Nazi problem. But I don’t think the modding community can ‘save’ Hearts of Iron IV, because it is simply a reflection of the game’s player-base.

Conclusions

The last time I am aware of that Paradox released who-plays-what-country statistics was in 2023. At that point, the top 10 played nations in the game were:

And it just seems relevant in a game that is about a war between the Axis powers, the Soviet Union and the western allies, the western allies – the democracies in that war – have fewer players collectively (9%) than the two halves of the Chinese Civil War (12%) or the Soviet Union alone (12%), much less, of course, Germany. Indeed, more people are playing Germany than any given three other countries added together.

There’s a relic of the game’s development I find interesting: the game’s main theme, dating from the base game’s release in 2016, was the theme of the (western) Allies. The initial cover art features MacArthur in the center, with one commander each from Britain, Germany, Japan and the USSR. In short, at launch, the game attempted to present, in important ways, the Allies as the ‘main characters,’ a stance that made more sense at the beginning when the focus trees of the Allies were roughly as (un)developed as those of the Axis.

I do not think anyone looking at Hearts of Iron IV today has any problem correctly assessing that its ‘main character’ is Nazi Germany. Evidently the player-base knows.

And before I get a chorus of loud complaints in the comments, I want to be clear what I am saying here and what I am not saying. I am not saying that everyone who plays Hearts of Iron IV does so because they like Nazi Germany or the Axis more broadly. Instead, what we see in the community around this game is one in which the majority of players are what we may fairly call ‘anti-Nazis’ but that at the same time the game has attracted an unusually vocal, unusually large minority following of extremists, kept in check primarily by the fact that their voices are actively, continually suppressed in the Paradox forums, the Steam Workshop and related communities like r/hoi4.

And that prompts a follow on question: why? One answer, of course, is simply that this is a World War II game and the Second World War is an obvious touchstone for Nazi-sympathizers. But certainly one does not get the immediate sense that all World War II games and media draw this kind of following.

I think in the process of working through Hearts of Iron IV‘s vision of history we come to a clearer answer: Hearts of Iron IV, often in the interest of streamlining and game balance, has blundered into offering a vision of history which is inaccurate in the specific ways that are likely to be flattering to pro-Nazi and pro-fascist players.

Whereas in practice, historians generally regard World War II as a contest between economic and political systems in which fascism proved inferior, HoI4 presents battlefield skill and operational art as the most important thing in war, exactly as the Axis powers thought. Whereas in practice, the war and the Cold War that followed it demonstrated the considerable advantages of liberal democracies and free market economies, HoI4 presents both democracy and market economics as liabilities, weak systems that are nothing but negatives, exactly as the Axis powers thought. Whereas historically, the Nazi economic plan of economic stabilization through conquest and mass murder had functionally no hope of success, in HoI4, it can work and even produce an economic miracle, exactly as the Axis powers thought.

In short, although the war itself demonstrated that Nazism, Italian fascism and Japanese militarism simply didn’t work as ideological, economic, political or cultural systems, Hearts of Iron IV instead posits a world in which they work exactly as their proponents – exactly as modern fascists – wish they did.

And of course, whereas historically the armies of the Axis, especially but not exclusively those of Nazi Germany, committed horrific atrocities wherever they went, Hearts of Iron IV functions as a ‘clean Wehrmacht simulator,’ reinforcing the post-war lie peddled by Nazi officers that presented the Wehrmacht as innocent of Nazi crimes (which were attributed all to the SS). That line, of course, plays into modern neo-Nazi minimization of Nazi crimes in a progression that has become blandly predictable in certain online spaces: they didn’t happen, or if they did happen the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht didn’t do them, or if they did they were good actually.

Put even more bluntly, Hearts of Iron IV has unintentionally created a simulator that presents World War II as modern fascists would like it to be. One suspects that at least some of the folks at Paradox are not wholly unaware of this – somewhat infamously the advertising for the major Germany update, Götterdämmerung, in 2024 veered more than a little uncomfortably towards Nazi propaganda.

Of course at the same time the shame of it is this game is built atop a truly remarkable operational simulator which does a really good job in expressing why operations in World War II took the form they did, shaped by terrain and logistics as much as by tanks and shells. And while the civilian industrial model is pretty flawed, the military industrial model is equally instructive in presenting some interesting trade-offs, even if it is forced to treat German and Japanese mistakes as if they were valid policies that could have succeeded in the long-run.

I do not think it is impossible to play Hearts of Iron IV responsibly. But I do think players need to go into this game forewarned and forearmed that the design and balance decisions made to make it an interesting strategy game also serve to skew the history it is presenting in very frustrating ways. And equally, I think the developers at Paradox need to give a lot more thought to how – if these balance choices are unavoidable for gameplay reasons – they can offer responsible historical framing to make clear to players what and how large the concessions to gameplay have been.

It might equally be worth asking, given where, very evidently, the development time and focus in the game have gone, why this is a game where the western allies – who emerged triumphant from the war and the Cold War that followed it – are less heavily played and have far less content than the Axis (or even really just Germany), who lost it.

But, for as much as I enjoy playing it (I have almost 600 hours in HoI4 and more than 300 in HoI3), Hearts of Iron IV is easily the most historically troublesome and flawed entry in Paradox’s catalog, a produce to be consumed with care because of how skewed its historical perspective is and how little effort there is to signal to the player the nature of that skew.

Instead, the game tilts unsteadily on the very edge of unintentional fascist propaganda, the sort of product that we do not teach…but find ourselves having to un-teach.