That might be precisely why they are my favorite now. Over the past year and a half or so I have developed a seething hatred of explicitly wish fulfilment fiction, due to events unrelated to hoi4, and having a faction that represents the exact opposite of that in every way possible without going into comically evil territory was like music to my ears. Plus they have the aesthetic, which is always important.
That being said I found it hard to play some of the other paths like Shafarevich for the same sort of "way too real" reason, so I do understand your dislike.
I'm not even into wish fulfillment
per se--as I posted a little bit earlier, I found Yagoda and Zhdanov quite intriguing to play as even though they are objectively pretty terrible places that I would not like to win unless the alternative was the Aryan Brotherhood or something. But those states
stand for something, or at least their leaders are trying to accomplish something more than just surviving to the next day and crushing the dreams of everyone in their country.
And you should get that checked out. "Seething hatred of wish fulfillment" isn't really healthy.
Tbh I think almost all modern states are like Novosibirsk, no? Most of the people are irreligious, not patriotic, economic prosperity is gone too so we just live one day after another without caring about ideals.
No, not really. Irreligion and lack of patriotism does not mean that people do not have ideals, it just means that they don't have religious or patriotic ideas. When you see things like the BLM protests or the Capitol insurrection, whatever you think about them they clearly are the result of ideals that people have, not ruthless unideological pragmatism that is purely focused on the bottom line.
"Lack of economic prosperity" also very much depends on who you are. I'm doing just fine, for instance. On the macro level there are problems, but it's not like everyone is enslaved to work twelve-hour days for a penny an hour while CEOs make billions of dollars, either.
For the all that people gloom on how Authdem Novosibirsk is Doomer country, where dreams go to die. This compass that was revealed before mod release, concerning the possible futures, seems to suggest otherwise. "Siberian anachronistic Putinism", is actually shown to be on the GOOD side of Russias future (interestingly enough, so is Despot SBA). That can obviously be debated, but it looks like the devs at least intended for Authdem Novo to be much more nuanced than a black hole of "Late Stage Capitalism". I suppose some ideological blinders do make many people blind to the positive sides of that path while considerably exaggerating the negatives (and I'll admit that would apply to me for some other warlords).
I didn't say that Novosibirsk was
bad, exactly. There are way worse outcomes for Russia. But it's not really a
good outcome, either. It's slightly better than Bunyachenko because there's still a certain amount of democracy (particularly if you go the democratic path, obviously) and the possibility of leveraging that to further reform in the future, which is why it's on the "good" side; but it's really not that much better, which is why it's right next to him.
Mostly my complaint was that it's depressing and not really fun to play as. Note that other factions can be interesting to play as or fun to play as despite being objectively bad, so this is distinct from saying that Novosibirsk is bad.
To be fair I think that Novosibirsk attitude here does deserve more consideration than it is often given credit.
By focusing on pragmatism, building-up a strong economy, strong foundations and strong institutions. It is better able to reunify Russia and improve the people's lot long-term. Where it eventually falls of the rails though is when it becomes too focused on preserving the system for the sake of and is unable to reform if Pokryshkin stays in power in the 1970s. Then the similarities with OTL Putin's Russia will be obvious and TNO2 could see this TTL Russian Federation reconquering Moscow but then losing the peace as it wastes its oil and nickel revenues in the same vein as most other countries historically did and can't reconstruct the former lands of Moskowien.
This is why in my ratings I explicitely rated Shukshin Novosibirsk as being far more likely to be successful long-term and economically and militarily stronger too.
You can make that argument, sure, but in-game it's just
wrong. There are plenty of Russian factions who can build strong economies, strong institutions (much stronger institutions, in fact, than a corporate-dominated authoritarian state with only the façade of democracy; those are not noted for their long-term healthiness), and strong foundations in terms of the social capital of the state. Kosygin or Stalina Komi, pretty much any of the Tomsk salons (they all have their own interesting approaches to the problem), Yagoda's Soviet Union (although it has decided brittleness due to the dominance of the security institutions as well, but China shows that this is not
necessarily fatal). Novosibirsk is not really notably stronger than any of those.
It's also worth pointing out that Novosibirsk originated. as a rebellion against Tomsk, which already
had a pragmatic political party (well, salon) focused on precisely building up a strong economy, strong foundations, and strong institutions: the Bastillards. Given that, it's hard to defend the existence of Novosibirsk on objective grounds--if they were really so concerned that it was too idealistic, they should have just joined the Bastillards.
I'll admit that this is my mindset at work too, but I've grown increasingly skeptical of idealistic politicians over the years that often fail to see the reality behind their ideals and their possible consequences. Here in the UK, Brexit is a quintessential example of a very idealistic project that ended up going badly wrong and creating way more harm than was ever anticipated and whose consequences will ripple through over years if not decades. By comparison, the status quo was certainly boring, certainly somewhat elitist and "more of the same". However as a saying says "the road to hell is paved with the best of intentions".
The status quo, in this case, was
also an idealistic project, in fact an even
more idealistic project because it was built around the (long-term) hope of unifying Europe into a federal state whereas Brexit was built around rejecting that and hunkering down as a quasi-hermit state. It's not Tomsk defeating Novosibirsk, it's more like Krasnorysk beating Tomsk. Yes, in many ways it's a worse state, but not because it's more or less idealistic.
My preference, in any case, is for pragmatic idealism. That is, political leadership that knows where they want to steer the ship (instead of purely focusing on not grounding it), but pays attention to the day-to-day troubles that can crop up and isn't averse to changing course or adopting other policies if they seem to overall further the ends or address significant issues. The best example of this I've come across so far in the mod is in the Iberian Union after it successfully democratizes, actually, if the Liberal Democrats win. They have to avoid being couped by the military while retaining political support, which means that they want to pursue on the one hand a policy of fulfilling their electoral promises and gradually defanging the military, while on the other hand not angering the military too much by going 100% on all of their desires. That's better than pure idealism or pragmatism (what are you even being pragmatic
for if you don't have
any ideals), and it's also more interesting to play as because you have to make actual tradeoffs while playing.
