Editing Hearts of Iron (section)

==Notable Mods==

[[File:TBbJJbA.jpg|right|800px|thumb|At least it is not a Hapsburg Family Tree]]

As with any other Paradox game, modding is a big part of it, to the point that some say that people don't buy HoI4 to play HoI4, they buy HoI4 to play Kaiserreich. Mods can be generally divided into two broad categories: "alt-hist wankfest" (''especially'' prominent for HoI4) and "other".

For simplicity's sake, let's start with "other":
*'''BlackIce''' - preferably the HoI3 version, as the one for HoI4 is still in early stages of development. Unlike other mods listed below, this one is strictly historical. It's main appeal is in taking already (in)famously autistic HoI3's gameplay and asking the question "what if we try to salvage it, while keeping it historical". The results is a mod that reinvents the wheel, utilising to full potential all the game mechanics in meaningful way rather than just having them and throwing at player a historical challenge of fighting the war as any of the country would, with thousands of thousands events going on for everyone, based both at starting reality and actions performed by player.
*'''Equestria at War''' - An oddball of the bunch, a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic HoI4 mod about the Post-Season 8 Ponies about to experience the horrors of industrialized warfare fighting against the Changeling blitzkrieg on one side of the ocean, while the mass of Griffon Empire remnant states are trying to restore said Empire in their image on the other side, plus the a new continent that is combination of Africa and Asia containing a mix of tribal nations and ancient fallen empires. On one hand: It is actually one of the better mods for HoI4, with the amount of well-designed content off the charts. On the other: [[HERESY|Ponies]].
*'''FODD''' - '''F'''all'''O'''ut '''D'''ooms'''D'''ay mod. As the name implies, this is an old one and lion share of development happend before Bethesda got their hands on Fallout franchise or its lore. It's a total overhaul mod, changing the game completely to support Fallout setting, picking off soon after Fallout 2 ended, with some elements from Tactics thrown in for good measure. It has atypical gameplay, as at the game start, most countries control at best three provinces (usually just one), map is reduced to North America (with its own, far more detailed map) and almost everything starts as controlled by "Wasteland", having to be settled first. Countless flavour events, even for minor nations, along with solid, HoI2 gameplay and making sure things work out within given premise. Eventually migrated to Darkest Hour and added some of New Vegas elements under overwhelming player's demand, but still refused to even touch Bethesda-made content before being wrapped up.
*'''HPP''' - another mod for HoI3, which is widely considered to be unofficial expansion, rather than a mod. Bunch of quality of life stuff combined with slight rework of certain mechanics and improved AI, without retooling too much of the game proper to qualify as a total overhaul mod. Also includes extra flavour to the game and a ''small'' bit of wiggle space for alternative history.
*'''Old World Blues''' - A total overhaul mod set in the Fallout universe relatively shortly before the events of New Vegas plus fuckton player content such as Latin America under a gas company's A.I, voodoo ghoul drug lords and priestesses. Canada is run by power-armor-viking-pirate clans emulating Ragnar Lodbrok, Caesar's Legion is in pre-White Legs debacle attacking the Hangdogs and NCR is dealing with nearby tribes and squatters. If you like post-Bethesda Fallout, you will enjoy this mod.
*'''Millennium Dawn''' - A mod set in modern day with 2000 and 2016 start dates. The best thing ever for some, while for others it is an example of the folly of trying to fit Modern Day setup into an engine designed for WW2. Merged with a mechanically very different modern day mod called Modern Day 4 in summer 2019, which received harsh criticism, and several "Classic" mods by different people were created to fill the void. Currently on the back burner following the TNO fiasco discussed below.
*'''[[Unification Wars]]''' - [[Awesome|Yes]]! As true as possible to everything garnered from 40k's [[Fluff]].
*'''War of the Worlds''' - Exactly what it says. H.G Wells' literary and Jeff Wayne's musical lovechild made into the game. Martians come in around 1938'ish and land in New Jersey, Grovers Mill. Unbalanced as fuck but it's Martians we are talking about. Martians can become communists and take earth with humans as a servant race(even employ a human minister to suppress and recruit auxiliaries), or go full fascist and eat humans for sustenance, driving every rival nation into panic and full scale war.
*'''HOI4 Beyond Earth''' - It's [[Awesome|Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri mixed with Civilization: Beyond Earth and new, expanded lore on top of it]]. Based on the backstory of the games instead of the "OG plot" proper, the game puts you on the shoes of a leader on the 23rd century after the "Great Mistake" fucked over with humanity and left Earth in ruins, with solutions running gamut from trying to maintain the status-quo and promoting peace in the planet, to reunifying humans under a single banner, to outright pulling a "LOLnope" and leaving Earth for new pastures, as a final war looms, one which promises to be [[Exterminatus|truly the last one humans will inflict on each other]]. Stated for release mid-2022, has been well-received in the community for the promising lore and the "Grimdark yet peppered with glimpses of hope" tone of it. Unfortunately discontinued, with the developer leaving assets for free use.

Alt-hist wankfest:
*'''1964 Mod''' - Arsenal of Democracy mod, made after the end date a multiplayer session, every major power played by very skilled human players over several weeks (The AAR that led to it is named "Democracy's Last Legs", found at the Paradox forums). Around 1964, Germany won... kind of. Nazis died out when its human player changed the government to a conservative one simulating erasing the SS and turning it to a technocracy. USSR was defeated, Germany released a puppet monarchist Russia and USSR retreated to the east as Lavrenti Beria used the German peace treaty to conquer China and Asia, turning it to a Pan-Asian Communist Empire. Japan, losing its Asian holdings shat its pants and buddied up Uncle Sam who itself went through a civil war after New York got nuked by Germans, and vice versa. Every capital city is nuked so hard in the conflagration that 1964 is as expansion prone as 1936 due to the devastation and losses, as well as Germany's many released countries to avoid rebellion and manpower waste. Oi Blyad, eto snova my!
*'''Kaiserreich''' - When people think about Hearts of Iron mods, it is most likely that they think about Kaiserreich. Initially starting out as ''All The Russias'', a mod about the Russian Civil War with dozen of sides, it soon evolved into a "What if Germany won WW1?" scenario where USA did not join the Great War, which along with other reasons will lead to the 2nd American Civil War, and where the Bolshevik revolution failed in Russia, but an ideologically similar but different Syndicalist revolutions succeeded in France and Great Britain, with the defeated governments fleeing to North Africa and Canada respectively. And then in 1936, the delayed Great Depression hits, and the already fragile and delicate power balance goes out of the window. Iconic parts include the Second American Civil War, Austria-Hungary becoming an island of sanity in a continent going mad, and Russia basically taking Germany's place as the main villain of the Second Weltkrieg in the most common path where a revanchist, reactionary dictatorship seizes control and begins plotting to avenge the nation's humiliation as Germany and France resume their usual slap-fights.
**'''Fuhrerreich''' - There is an event in Kaiserreich which describes a book about "What if Germany lost the Weltkrieg?", which mirrors the OTL but with in-universe's pro-monarchistic bent and with syndicalism coloring the view on communism, and this mod is basically that, meta of a meta.
**'''Kalterkrieg''' - Post 2nd Weltkrieg mod where most of major Syndicalist powers were defeated and the world settled into a Cold War between the Reichspakt and the Entente, with the 2nd American Civil War STILL ongoing.
**'''Kaiserredux''' - Submod, later separate fork to Kaiserreich focusing more on fun and "wacky" scenarios over the realism of the "main" mod. Notable for expanding the American Civil War into a bloated shitfest with 6 main factions in total that can end with even ''more'' states like Texas, Alaska, Arizona and the city of New York seceding alongside Black and Indian revolts, with potential unifiers ranging from [[Noblebright|surprisingly stable, progressive and free]] to completely [[Grimderp]] situations like an america reunified by [[SJW|The Nation of Islam who deports and genocide white people while promoting black supremacism and instigating an even more fundamentalistic version of the Sharia Law]] or [[/pol/|The Old Klan, a bunch of rabid racists who create a white supremacist personality cult while persecuting catholics and treating women like 18th century america]], even [[H.P. Lovecraft]] instilling an esoteric monarchy with genuine Lovecraftian undertones, with four different future variations such as Lovecraftian socialism where he stops racism in USA, instilling a militarist society that arms up against Elder beings. Other iconic paths include those restored from OG Kaiserreich that were removed for being too "unrealistic" like [[Communism|Stalin controlling Georgia]] or Roman von Ungern-Sternberg LARPing as [[Genghis motherfucking Khan|Genghis Khan]] in Mongolia. Also, it's infamous for running '''horribly''' even on good PCs and being unplayable by the lategame unless you have absurd specs and/or lower the settings.
*'''The New Order: Last Days of Europe''' - [[/pol/|What if the Nazis won]], gone full [[Grimdark]]. Released 21 July 2020, the mod is a remake of HoI4 in a very dark fashion with countless new features, from money & taxes to new tickers and gauges for separate factions which became prominent in minigames for alternate faction plots. Lots of [[Fluff]](each nation has more text-events than the base game total for every nation combined), almost no [[Crunch]] unless you play a Russian warlord to reunite Russia, so plays like a decision game like Suzerain. Famous for "Superevents", plot-wise critical events with the jingle of a Leitmotif, a cinematic picture and a big-ass explanation. Many nations have the chance to start a nuclear war and end human civilization; it's one nation's ''win condition''. (Happily, there is an option to prevent this escalation from happening randomly.) Suffered a massive shakeup [[Not as Planned|after a devbuild was leaked...]] resulting in accusations of cronyism, Pro-Soviet revisionism and general power abuse amongst the devteam, and their response was to <s>calmly explain themselves</s> [[Blam|silence all dissent]], which was only exacerbated when evidence came forth of the devteam grooming minors. Development has gone back to normal after a small purge, releasing a massive update overhauling and expanding the base game’s economic mechanics. Nowadays the [[skub]] tends to instead come from the current team's attempts to completely rework and replace all the old content for reasons of realism and/or historicity instead of progressing the timeline. Even when old skeleton content gets fleshed out and made playable, it often gets totally changed in the bargain.
*'''Red Dawn''' - The Soviet Union wins the Cold War (point of divergence being the Korean War), only to find out that their victory is hollow. Per typical leftists, now everyone fights over the concept of "True Communism" and create their own factions. The US is a balkanized mess made up of racists, leftists, social liberals, rightists, corporatists and every other political view imaginable. Oh, and Bernie Sanders is a [[Just as Planned|mastermind with a secret agenda]].
*'''Red Flood''' - What if NO ONE won WW1? Council Communist Second International is in every continent and they clearly plan to flood the world with red conscripts, facing reactionary right-wing governments and futurist crazies and Russia is balkanized. Iconic for its "le happy Goebbels" portrait of a communist Germany, a moderate, non-racist Hitler defending Austria vs extremism (later clobbered when it started attracting actual fascists and people unfamiliar with the backstory of other mods it was referencing) and a batshit insane [[SJW|futurist, anti-modernist]] France bent on world conquest with [[Slaanesh|Slaaneshi]] and caveman variations in the beginning.
*'''Road to 56''' - A Frankenstein amalgamation of mods made into a megamod that gives every nation a unique focus tree, and makes everyone act ahistorically. Has funny bugs, still very popular.
*'''Thousand Week Reich''' - What if the Nazis "kinda" won after UK throws in the towel and signs White Peace after Dunkirk, but the Reich barely held together? Is TNO's lighter and softer version. German civil war can be avoided, Japan is defeated, China is the new rising power thanks to ''massive'' nuclear bombing of the Japanese archipelago, which can devolve into communism, or fascism and invaded again. Italy is, as usual, flip-flopping.
*'''Disaster: Death of Peace''' - Red Flood alike mod; less meme insanity, more grimdark. '''Every''' major(or even average) country is balkanized when Versailles Conference ends up in a brawl. Even USA. Since the devs are Turkish, expect a dozen superevents for that already tiny shithole balkanized over9000 times.
*'''Pax Britannica: An Imperial Timeline''' - what if the American revolution never succeeded, Austria united the German lands and the world just accepted all the insane shit Nicola Tesla had invented? Pretty solid mod with plenty of war crimes to commit, from chemical weapons to combat psychedelics and lab-grown hivemind cattle-sized bugs. Currently has focus trees for British Empire, France, United Lands of Germany and United Commonwealth (the original 13 colonies plus Florida), with planned expansions for Russian Empire and United States of China.
*'''The Fire Rises''' - What if the Covid-19 pandemic was more severe? Set at the start of the pandemic, the dominoes start to fall after the Saudi king catches the disease and dies, which leads to Saudi Arabia collapsing into civil war and oil prices rising. Putin catches the coof too, which serves to only delay the invasion of Ukraine, and things continue to escalate from there. The mod features new unit types, simplified economy (compared to Millenium Dawn), and overall has the potential to become the next TNO in terms of content flavor and gameplay shakeups.