Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg

As someone who was excited for CBTS and hoping for a comprehensive Soviet tree, that’s a damn shame...

I don’t think there’s any mod out there that has a really good Soviet focus tree, Kaiserreich included (that should really be up there on the development list IMO)

I’ve been trying out a game in Kaiserreich recently with this sub mod I found called Lenin Lives in which the Reds still won the Russian Civil War and Lenin lives until about 1937. It’s got a few cool flavor events but only slight changes to the Soviet focus tree which was disappointing: if I had any experience in modding I would attempt to make one on my own but I have no idea where to even begin lmao

Yeah no one seem to be interested in good/accurate portrayal of the soviet union. To be fair, with the starting date, there isn't much to do except display Stalin's paranoia along a single part, it's too late for it to branch out significantly.

TWR may get interesting about it, even if it's silly at times.
 
Yeah no one seem to be interested in good/accurate portrayal of the soviet union. To be fair, with the starting date, there isn't much to do except display Stalin's paranoia along a single part, it's too late for it to branch out significantly.

TWR may get interesting about it, even if it's silly at times.

Im hoping TNO comes through given their dedication to “realism” and good storytelling/flavor, although the “Soviet Union” in that timeline would be almost unrecognizable from OTL. Plus they seem to be going all out in grimdark-ness with pretty much every path being a horrible mess, but given the setting perhaps that’s fair to an extent.
 
Im hoping TNO comes through given their dedication to “realism” and good storytelling/flavor, although the “Soviet Union” in that timeline would be almost unrecognizable from OTL. Plus they seem to be going all out in grimdark-ness with pretty much every path being a horrible mess, but given the setting perhaps that’s fair to an extent.

Zhukov looks like a pretty good path. But yeah the soviet union would be quite different there. It already is thanks to no Stalin, in fact, since the official lore is that it lost the war under Bukharin.
 
I suppose that makes sense within the lore of Kaiserreich - the Second Russian Civil War is an unrealistic mess and the establishment of a USSR that’s pretty much the same as that of ITTL Lenin’s failed state doesn’t really make much sense. Do you know if they are reworking the whole Kerensky Russian Republic scenario? This is one of the worst parts of the lore in my opinion and it is badly in need of revision, it makes no sense that the White generals like Denikin, Vrangel, and Yudenich subdue the Reds and then they literally just return Kerensky, the embarrassed and thoroughly discredited politician that the victorious warlords of Russia literally have every reason to despise.
Sheer inertia drags against, as I understand it. Kaiserreich has the issue that it literally started as a mod with pretty much the premise you cite (it's slightly more the Whites establishing a proper united front with Kerensky, the embarrassed and thoroughly discredited politician, as a figurehead, that allowing them to subdue the Reds, and then somehow Kerensky sticks around until 1936), the CP victory only came later, when All the Russias became Kaiserreich - and that was still over a decade ago.

On a related note, last I heard you can still transition to a Soviet state in the Russia rework, but not through a civil war and it uses dynamic trees and cosmetic tags, so you're still RUS.
 

AeroTheZealousOne

Monthly Donor
Hmm, I haven’t had the time to check out Fuhrerreich - I’ll have to give it a go later and see how it is, thanks for the suggestion!

Without context, here are all of the possible post-Lenin leaders that I am aware of:

* Mikhail Tukhachevsky
* Nikolai Yezhov
* Vyacheslav Molotov
* Sergey Kirov
* Grigory Zinoviev Leon Trotsky
* Nikolai Bukharin
* Alexander Shliapnikov
* Kliment Voroshilov

Not sure who their Soviet Dev is but I personally like how they went with it.
 
Im hoping TNO comes through given their dedication to “realism” and good storytelling/flavor, although the “Soviet Union” in that timeline would be almost unrecognizable from OTL. Plus they seem to be going all out in grimdark-ness with pretty much every path being a horrible mess, but given the setting perhaps that’s fair to an extent.
TNO is a joke at this point, honestly. I played the demo, it had some good ideas but the execution was very poor, with a bland linear path, lots of overwritten events that don't really affect anything, a deliberately "authoritarianism is good because people are too terrible to make democracy work and also hope is a lie" attitude, and a social development system that in my opinion does a terrible job of modeling how social changes actually work in real life.

TWR looks more realistic so far (the Atlantropa thing in TNO is especially ridiculous, considering that IRL (a) that land would be useless and (b) actually building the dam would probably be nearly impossible even for a stable superpower economy) and doesn't have blatant Speer apologism. And it has so many paths for the rump USSR! From "black comedy" (Zhukov moves the entire NKVD to a barren island and then tests nukes on their heads) to the actually hopeful (an OTL professor can take over the post-Beria USSR and transform it into what looks like a semi-functional democracy, if you can survive the inevitable confrontations with the Nazis and the other Russian warlords) to the straight-up weird (a slightly insane German expat who's gone native and wants to launch a straight-up crusade against the Nazis, not that anybody in Russia's really going to need much convincing to go to war against literal Nazis).

Also the sheer horror of Reinhard Heydrich systematically murdering three million people and building a resort on their graves is somehow more existentially disturbing than anything TNO and its farcical warlords, meme villains, and comically over-complicated civil wars has yet done.
 
CBTS's portrayal of the USSR is godawful though. It brings back long dead white movements out of nowhere with the same logic as vanilla with the purge being necessary, and try to claim that any of that is more likely than Trotsky. Who was himself not very likely at that start date, but their entire white fabrication is much more out there.

I wouldn't call the DNVP rational by any means. The old German aristocracy was easily as economically disastrous as the nazis, and in fact the nazis failing to deal with the junkers' failing agriculture was a big part of nazi Germany's food insecurity.

I'm not a big fan of CBTS's portrayal of anything, but yeah, they were the first mod to go for negative focuses.

I was excited for the DNVP, I didn't even mentioned the soviet tree until someone else mentioned.

That being said, I mentioned how they portrayed the Nazi Racial Laws and how I found it a way to represent the damage done to the player by taking a very stupid focus, something that even the PR says how "There is no reason to take these focus apart from Role play, since they only hurt you". I stand by that point.
 
The name of federalist forces is the national defense army (国防军)it was revealed in the progress report
 
Plus they seem to be going all out in grimdark-ness with pretty much every path being a horrible mess, but given the setting perhaps that’s fair to an extent.

This is objectively false. TNO has already shown many paths that are good, such as Ciano's Italy and Speer's or Spiedel's Germany
 
This is objectively false. TNO has already shown many paths that are good, such as Ciano's Italy and Speer's or Spiedel's Germany

I was more generalizing, I’ve just noticed a trend on the discord that if anyone brings up some sort of revolutionary change in Germany or the East that isn’t in some way a continuation of the fascist regime or objectively disgusting and murderous, the dev(s) pull up with a very grimdark attitude and explicitly say nothing humane could really come out of it (see DSR, the Jewish partisan groups, etc.)

Not saying it’s explicitly wrong for the setting, but it is a running trend at least I think I’ve picked up on that they’re shooting for - the world is pretty dark after all
 
it makes no sense that the White generals like Denikin, Vrangel, and Yudenich subdue the Reds and then they literally just return Kerensky, the embarrassed and thoroughly discredited politician that the victorious warlords of Russia literally have every reason to despise

I think the lore is that Germans force Kerensky back in exactly because every else hates him in order to make Russia unstable.
 
I think the lore is that Germans force Kerensky back in exactly because every else hates him in order to make Russia unstable.

So Russia would essentially be a German satellite state? Kerensky probably wouldn’t manage to be a stable head of state without White forces being strictly kept in check by Germany which is a commitment I don’t think the Kaiserreich would waste their resources on. The White generals are at least monarchical, and both Kerensky and the generals fought for the Entente against Germany so there’s still that lingering about. The generals who won the civil war would also very likely be trying to depose him from the start.
 

AeroTheZealousOne

Monthly Donor
TNO is a joke at this point, honestly. I played the demo, it had some good ideas but the execution was very poor, with a bland linear path, lots of overwritten events that don't really affect anything, a deliberately "authoritarianism is good because people are too terrible to make democracy work and also hope is a lie" attitude, and a social development system that in my opinion does a terrible job of modeling how social changes actually work in real life.

TWR looks more realistic so far (the Atlantropa thing in TNO is especially ridiculous, considering that IRL (a) that land would be useless and (b) actually building the dam would probably be nearly impossible even for a stable superpower economy) and doesn't have blatant Speer apologism. And it has so many paths for the rump USSR! From "black comedy" (Zhukov moves the entire NKVD to a barren island and then tests nukes on their heads) to the actually hopeful (an OTL professor can take over the post-Beria USSR and transform it into what looks like a semi-functional democracy, if you can survive the inevitable confrontations with the Nazis and the other Russian warlords) to the straight-up weird (a slightly insane German expat who's gone native and wants to launch a straight-up crusade against the Nazis, not that anybody in Russia's really going to need much convincing to go to war against literal Nazis).

Also the sheer horror of Reinhard Heydrich systematically murdering three million people and building a resort on their graves is somehow more existentially disturbing than anything TNO and its farcical warlords, meme villains, and comically over-complicated civil wars has yet done.

I find that you and I share quite a bit of common ground on ideological matters but that we completely disagree on each other's views of TNO*. Mind you, it is a demo and they did rush it and Orenburg was pretty much destined to be dysfunctional in their current state** and Panzer can be a bit... eccentric at times, the systems of social changes and economic simulation were not all that usable then, but I was quite intrigued and fascinated about all the events between the four countries and reading the events and internally stating "oh dear" hundreds of times yet appreciating the dark humor in the events of Magnitogorsk and the Black Bandits. The way things look right now TNO is probably going to blow Kaiserreich right out of the water in terms of content, even if the backstory had a few liberties in it.

In any case, Thousand-Week Reich is definitely the more "down-to-earth" of the two mods with a more realistic premise and outcome and I'm actively looking forward to them as well, though I really should catch up on their development diaries sometime soon. The rump USSR in that mods looks fun as hell from your descriptions, so I'm definitely going to go read up on this.



*Though I do agree with you on Atlantropa - while it makes for an interesting story and I'm willing to mentally handwave it purely for the sake of that, your points plus the process of building such a large dam (let alone a series of dams) at the edge of the Mediterranean and draining it into the middle of Africa between the late forties and the fifties is quite literally unfeasible. The reason it hasn't been removed at this stage is because it's quite well ingrained into TNO's lore and gives Hitler's former allies a reason to flip him the bird and split from the Axis in the postwar world. I'm not sure exactly whether to call it "apologism" per se, he's still doing a lot of terrible stuff like letting war criminals get free in order to "liberalize" the Nazi state and its economy, but at the end of the day a Nazi is still a Nazi and the reforms were only done out of pragmatism and not as a true believer in freedom and democracy.

**When you played the demo, I'm not sure if you were aware that there actually is a path to remain LibSoc as Orenburg and succeed in pulling off those reforms while keeping both Malenkov and Burba out of power. It does involve dividing the council as little as possible and saving up a lot of political power to make it work, but it is quite doable.
 
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but at the end of the day a Nazi is still a Nazi and the reforms were only done out of pragmatism and as a true believer in freedom and democracy.

There is this speer documentary on youtube (arr!), something that it is said that there it is like the perfect quote is:

"There is no such thing as a good nazi, and even if this was possible, Speer would be as far away as possible from that."
 

AeroTheZealousOne

Monthly Donor
There is this speer documentary on youtube (arr!), something that it is said that there it is like the perfect quote is:

"There is no such thing as a good nazi, and even if this was possible, Speer would be as far away as possible from that."

That's exactly right.

Also quoting my post I realized I made a typo, thanks for inadvertently letting me know to fix it!
 
I find that you and I share quite a bit of common ground on ideological matters but that we completely disagree on each other's views of TNO*. Mind you, it is a demo and they did rush it and Orenburg was pretty much destined to be dysfunctional in their current state** and Panzer can be a bit... eccentric at times, the systems of social changes and economic simulation were not all that usable then, but I was quite intrigued and fascinated about all the events between the four countries and reading the events and internally stating "oh dear" hundreds of times yet appreciating the dark humor in the events of Magnitogorsk and the Black Bandits. The way things look right now TNO is probably going to blow Kaiserreich right out of the water in terms of content, even if the backstory had a few liberties in it.

In any case, Thousand-Week Reich is definitely the more "down-to-earth" of the two mods with a more realistic premise and outcome and I'm actively looking forward to them as well, though I really should catch up on their development diaries sometime soon. The rump USSR in that mods looks fun as hell from your descriptions, so I'm definitely going to go read up on this.



*Though I do agree with you on Atlantropa - while it makes for an interesting story and I'm willing to mentally handwave it purely for the sake of that, your points plus the process of building such a large dam (let alone a series of dams) at the edge of the Mediterranean and draining it into the middle of Africa between the late forties and the fifties is quite literally unfeasible. The reason it hasn't been removed at this stage is because it's quite well ingrained into TNO's lore and gives Hitler's former allies a reason to flip him the bird and split from the Axis in the postwar world. I'm not sure exactly whether to call it "apologism" per se, he's still doing a lot of terrible stuff like letting war criminals get free in order to "liberalize" the Nazi state and its economy, but at the end of the day a Nazi is still a Nazi and the reforms were only done out of pragmatism and not as a true believer in freedom and democracy.

**When you played the demo, I'm not sure if you were aware that there actually is a path to remain LibSoc as Orenburg and succeed in pulling off those reforms while keeping both Malenkov and Burba out of power. It does involve dividing the council as little as possible and saving up a lot of political power to make it work, but it is quite doable.
I think Panzer is a lot like SM Stirling as a writer. He should've just done a novel instead of a mod, because the demo at least wasn't very fun to play. It was literally just sitting there watching focuses tick down for hours and sometimes reading an event about Russians being jerks to each other.

The thing about Orenburg that really defines the entire mod for me is that someone basically proposes "hey how about we literally just replicate the American presidential system and have regular elections?" and both the authoritarians unite to take that group down ASAP. Also Burba is portrayed remarkably positively for a petty despot. The whole experience--and I played all four factions, and did both paths for Orenburg (I did try to avoid picking a chairman but I never managed to get it to work so I figured it was one of the shitty "failure is the only option" paths--was boring, in fact the only humor that actually worked was Lysenko the mad scientist and that got old fast. The whole experience was dull and the "humor" was basically edgelord "dank meme" crap.

TWR at least managed to get the jarring tone shift of black comedy suddenly becoming horror right. "Ha ha this infamous Nazi is running a resort, what a hoot--jesus fuck he murdered HOW MANY PEOPLE to build the resort on their bones??" That's a lot more horrifying than Apocalypse Cultist Himmler because it's such a banal reason to commit appalling evil, and reinforces the top-to-bottom inhumanity of the Nazi regime. Less a supervillain and more just "what the actual fuck is wrong with this guy?"

Also Speer's slavery economy tree and Zhukov's "nuke the NKVD, then shoot Konev just to be sure" plan to fix the USSR drew a chuckle out of me. The latter is something of a meme but it actually makes sense in the context of a post-Beria rump USSR in limbo.

Here's some of the options for TWR's USSR:
Vasily Zaytsev: https://old.reddit.com/r/twrmod/comments/ccye3f/the_final_nkvd_tree_zaytsev/
Zhukov dealing with Beria's legacy: https://i.redd.it/9hsnztzs96931.png
https://old.reddit.com/r/twrmod/comments/c7o26s/director_secretary_what_is_going_on/
https://old.reddit.com/r/twrmod/comments/c7aurc/the_single_most_miserable_oath_for_the_union/ (Kuznetsov is a doomed path but at least making everything into a gulag is just a little amusing)
https://old.reddit.com/r/twrmod/comments/c6x2ad/mr_konev_this_is_for_the_grand_marshall/ Stalin Jr.
https://old.reddit.com/r/twrmod/comments/c3z7d9/purging_is_goodright/ Konev is like Pinochet except with planes instead of helicopters.
https://old.reddit.com/r/twrmod/comments/c5xapx/the_only_non_socialist_ussr_leader/ Weird but amusing option.
https://old.reddit.com/r/twrmod/comments/c367ks/the_final_of_the_socdem_nkvd_trees/ Vigdorova is an economy nerd and has a very hard but peaceful reclamation plan.
https://i.redd.it/4xoigjxmtg531.png "Fyodor Ivanov" is a renegade German with a quasi-Nietzschean philosophy who apparently believes that the Russian people's continued survival and will to resist proves them a superior race to the Germans. Or something.
And this is Yuri Orlov, who's a real person and a professor OTL: https://i.redd.it/uvyzxzmmw8531.png https://i.redd.it/tl8tu7l3dl631.png https://i.redd.it/et9m80s15ke31.png He's a well-meaning socdem idealist who can take over after Molotov promises reforms, tries to turn tyrant, and is killed for it.

Zhukov's future nuclear test site: https://old.reddit.com/r/twrmod/comments/ccld02/everyones_favorite_future_nuclear_test_site/

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/468937771516690432/591641539164373012/SS_Faction_Teaser.png Himmler's Germany (jesus fuck everything to do with him and Heydrich is balls to the wall horror, like Gotenland)

Also, TWR revolutionary France (I think after communist resistance overthrows the French State):
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/468937771516690432/602194247592181772/FRASocMLTeaser.png
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/468937771516690432/613099184161030172/FRA_Minet_Teaser.png
I really like these two for some reason. They came to the Revolution (tm) bright-eyed and idealistic, and a decade or so of being beaten out on the anvil of life later, they have literally nothing left but the Revolution (tm).
 
If the Communist branch of the Resistance ends up on top after the Resistance overthrows the French state, as I understand it. It can also end up in more ordinary democracy, of Do It Ourselves and Invite the Free French Back In varieties.
 

AeroTheZealousOne

Monthly Donor
The whole experience was dull and the "humor" was basically edgelord "dank meme" crap.
I feel that. I know for a fact you haven't been one for memes, but edgelords are essentially like pizza cutters: All edge, no point.

Burba is portrayed remarkably positively for a petty despot.
I can't help but agree. Even if the quality of life in Orenburg goes up, is it really worth the sacrifice of life and limb of the people? There's also an event that kind of shows that Orenburg has massively changed in that it is noticed that the freedom they had earlier is well and truly gone under Burba, I don't have a copy of it on my computer right now but that was kind of a "what have I done" moment when playing as them. Manufacture of radios and new radio stations and such doesn't outweigh the presence of the existence of an oppressive hierarchy.

The whole experience was dull and the "humor" was basically edgelord "dank meme" crap.
Yeah, I got tired of that quickly. I sort of like Red World and even though its creator has explicitly stated that it isn't a meme mod Bernie Sanders being a National Bolshevik and Bill Gates leading a socialist technocracy kind of leaves me in doubt there. Dark humor has a charm to it only if the setting isn't Warhammer: 40k levels of grimdark or just dank meme levels of nonsense.

With this aside for the moment, let me jump in to see this madness... No, not that madness!

Vasily Zaytsev:
Traditionalist Socialism is oxymoronic (emphasis on "moronic") and from a theoretical standpoint combining neo-feudalism with socialism sounds absolutely disastrous. (It also sounds like a poorly thought-out compromise involving tsarism.)

Zhukov dealing with Beria's legacy:
The NKVD gets its own frozen autonomous SR and is deported to it. Considering their... reputation, I can't really hold fault in this. The NKVD must have done something absolutely awful ITTL beyond a massive purge to be dealt with in this manner.

Kruglov actually looks pretty okay by Soviet standards.

Kuznetsov
Absolutely cursed.

Stalin Jr.
Like father, like son. But hold the fuck up why is he using the colors of National Bolshevism?
(EDIT: Oh, it's something called "Zhukovism". As long as Zhukovism isn't red fascism I think it should be okay.)

Konev is like Pinochet except with planes instead of helicopters.
No wonder Zhukov has a focus dedicated exclusively to removing this guy from the picture.

[Bulganin's] Weird but amusing option.
The only non-socialist plan out of all of them so far, it looks like his plan may or may not be a hard sell. Weird indeed, especially using that imperial black-gold-white tricolor.

Vigdorova is an economy nerd and has a very hard but peaceful reclamation plan.
Looks like COMECON is exclusive to Vigdorova's policies.

"Fyodor Ivanov"
This looks a little too good to be true but it's definitely more of an inverse (and less evil distant counterpart) of TNO's Andreas Meier.

Yuri Orlov
Once TWR is out I'll definitely try a playthrough with this guy. His ideas look pretty good and the flag looks pretty nice as well.

Zhukov's future nuclear test site
Apparently the NKVD in this world were nasty enough to have their slice of paradise designated as a nuclear test site by Zhukov.

Himmler's Germany (jesus fuck everything to do with him and Heydrich is balls to the wall horror, like Gotenland)
*1984 soundtrack intensifies*

Also, TWR revolutionary France (I think after communist resistance overthrows the French State)
Minet's France does not look like a pleasant place to be but it's still preferable to Germany in any Nazi Victory TL.


EDIT: Apologies for getting a little too off-track from Kaiserreich. I was unaware that they have an AH.com presence as well.
 
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Traditionalist Socialism is oxymoronic (emphasis on "moronic") and from a theoretical standpoint combining neo-feudalism with socialism sounds absolutely disastrous. (It also sounds like a poorly thought-out compromise involving tsarism.)
There's apparently a bit of Strasserism to it, in that one of the in-universe sources of inspiration was one of Strasser's works and Vasily Zaytsev is apparently a little bit of a fanboy for Strasser, or, at least, was so when his trees were being posted. To be fair, the book was one of Strasser's wartime works (Zaytsev found it on a dead German soldier during Barbarossa), when he'd done some distancing from his earlier antisemitism. Strasser had some... strange ideas.
Looks like COMECON is exclusive to Vigdorova's policies.
TWR's COMECON is basically Vigdorava putting in a layer of government above the Soviet government as part of the peaceful reunification efforts, as I understand it, kind of like a weird EU more so than OTL COMECON.


Meanwhile, I'm still looking forward to trying to achieve the UPC when the China Rework comes.
 
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