Well, kinda. Or sometimes. Otherwise it's probably gonna be two rounds of two-sided civil wars.
Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg
- Thread starter RiverDelta
- Start date
Well, kinda. Or sometimes. Otherwise it's probably gonna be two rounds of two-sided civil wars.
That was a really neat piece of alt-hist start to finish. The little stories from in universe characters were really well written and the new world and cultures that spawned were really interesting and fleshed out. Sure it's implausible but it was based on a play-through where he played Canada in a game... What's your beef?
Because the fact that you used the term "ententeaboo" makes it seem like you take this fictional universe designed for a video game where the idea is to have fun a tad too seriously...
Last edited:
The unplausibility, and the aus taking the stupidity virus from the drakaverse.
I have nothing against the writing, it is so.well done that if the world is a utopia or a dystopia is entirely up to your interpretation.
I mean, of course its implausible, but it's just a story based on decisions by the AI. But it's certainly pretty interesting to write and read about a fucked up America. I'd argue those elements are the AAR's strongest points, you get to imagine a world where the former US is collection of collapsing, authoritarian states.
I mean I've seen the the arguments in the comments about "this world is better than ours" or "this proves the Entente are good/evil" are just ughhh. All these people declaring "XYZ" is the most plausible, or the most realistic or the most "good" and shouting at each other with long speels on the forums and reddit is just headache inducing. Have your opinions but people get so worked up. It's a game guys, relax and enjoy...
Last edited:
They are not, apart from the main AUS all the other states are pretty good and prosperous places apart from the authoritarism.
*A good chunk of the US is a collapsing authoritarian nightmare and then that bit explodes again. Then catches fire. Then is doused with lemon juice. Then falls into a glass bin.
My favorite chapter in the whole thing has to be the kid running the border into the NER. The part where the guy with him say "This country really used to be something". Chills.
Last edited:
The reworks of China and Italy are not major divergences from the original in my book since the overall theme was maintained in both instances. In the case of the former, a similar outline was already being considered (albeit with fewer warlord tags given the limits of the DH engine) just before Hearts of Iron 4 was released. Similarly, reversing the positions of the two major Italian factions was high on the developer wishlist, but since time and manpower restraints were a very big factor in the waning days of DH development that never got off the ground. The addition of nonsensical (IMHO) tags to the Italian theatre aside, I can see a lot of the original in the new set-up.
As for your proposals: I find it curious that you would go to such lengths in ridiculing the current setup as unresearched when you yourself display such a simplistic and unnuanced perception of Indian history and politics that is - ultimately - tied to the Western hyperfocus on the religious divide of OTL. For example, organised republicanism, and the Congress Movement espousing it, was pretty much non-existent in the South until the middle to late 40s. The Princes in the South (especially in Mysore and Travancore) managed to contain them quite well until the Raj began to crack. Similarly, Hindu-nationalism only arose to such power (and then only after the Emergency) because the Muslim League managed to break through into mainstream politics and put Pakistan on the map: Figuratively as well as literally.
Then you do not understand the historical development of modern India just before and after the First World War. India had enthusiastically joined the war: "... the swords of the martial princes leapt from their scabbards" when the call from London came. It was decidedly understood that the war would bring about Home Rule - Dominion status. It would take the interwar and war years filled with British autocracy and reduction of personal liberties to swing the pendulum in favour of complete unabashed independence. By maintaining links with the Entente, the Delhi government keeps the quite solid argument that its authority is directly descendent from the previously undisputed state actor on the subcontinent. Out of three successor states, I would say that they have the most international recognition.
Again, I don't own Hearts of Iron 4 (and don't think I honestly ever will) so I can't comment on the mechanics and how the lore has been fitted to them. On paper, all three states are unstable. If someone feels that should be explicitly stated I would probably (if I had the time and drive) code a simple "internal problem X causes dissent of Y" and make it conditional on different triggers. As for your other point (which no longer is tied to the name of the war??), I think you overestimate the Western concept of nationalism in an Indian context. India as a whole (and the North West in particular) is a massive patchwork of interwoven ethnicities and religious creeds. Restoring the Durand Line cements the government's legitimacy by restoring the pre-war borders of the Raj - i.e. undivided India.
I think you should reread the timeline one more time to be honest and then write a well-thought and researched counter to it. I would love to read it!
OK, so the aristocrats were happy to join the war, and could convince enough people that this meant de facto independence, but post-WW1 what's changed? IOTL Mont-Ford was a slap in the face, and I suspect that the average Indian citizen wasn't as happy to join the war as the "martial princes".
This is the sum total that the KR Timeline page on the wiki has to say about India:I think you should reread the timeline one more time to be honest and then write a well-thought and researched counter to it. I would love to read it!
This is what the Dominion wiki page says:
This is more like a British-in-exile lapdog than a nominally loyal but de facto independent state. Also, there's no mention of Mont-Ford being anything but as insulting and authoritarian as OTL.
Please share them!
But the Durand line is a border drawn on a map by imperialists who didn't understand a damn thing about the people whose land they were carving up. IOTL it's a major root cause of instability in Pakistan and Afghanistan since it leaves both countries with sizable angry nationalist ethnic minorities. And like I said, if a bunch of Pashto sheperds don't want to be part of India, then why try to force them? It presents a security problem for a veneer of "legitimacy", restoring it announces an intent to return to borders drawn by foreign conquerors...how is this a good thing?
There could be a national spirit for each one of the three states giving a -20% stability and -20% war support. It could be similar to the Qing "Fallen empire" trait that can only be removed after the country is unified.
I also think that the name "Delhi" shouldn't be used anymore since it is not the official name, it would be like calling the AUS as "Union" or the CSA as "Syndicalists". Instead Delhi should be "Dominion of India" and the barathia could be "Commune of India".
ALso the civil war on Princely federation happens all the time now, it is not like on DH that you could find a compromise when creating the Kaiser of India avoiding it. Maybe the civil war could only happen if the stability falls below 30%.
I've always wondered how the Great Depression panned into something so terrible in the United States when the Credit of the Entente Debt crashed things in the early 20s rather than late 20s. Without a major roaring 20s boom, how does the depression and then Black Monday happen at the same time? If Germany is the center of global credit and economic power, why does a crash of the New York stock market 29 still hit extremely hard?
The US-economy crashs 1925, because the british revolution cause a financial panic. I think it get worser, because Germany fights a trade war aagainst the USA and cutting her out of more and more markets (China). German sphere booms till 1936, till the bubble burst.
The British-Indian army of WW1 and WW2 was a volunteer force. In 1918 its size had reached almost 600.000 men. In WW2 its size rose to almost 2.5 million.
Furthermore, here's some quotes from Lawrence James' "Raj: The Making of British India" 2009:
"India was never so united as it was in August 1914. Old tensions and animosities were suspended and representatives of every race, religion and caste publicly declared their loyalty to the King Emperor and willingness to join the struggle against Germany."
This is what Gandhi had to say about the war and Britain in July 1918:
"An Empire that has been defending India and of which India aspires to be the equal partner is in great peril, and it ill befits India to stand aloof at the hour of its destiny.... India would be nowhere without Englishmen. If the British do not win, whom shall we go for claiming equal partnership? Shall we go to the victorious German or the Turk or the Afghan? We shall have no right to do so; the victorious nation will set its mind on imposing taxes, or repressing, harassing and tyrannizing over the vanquished. Only after making its position secure will it listen to our demands, whereas the liberty-loving English will surely yield, when they have seen that we have laid down our lives for them."
Damn. All those aristocrats.
That's... the oldest timeline and not the one behind the current setup. I suggest you read that one before actually commenting.
You're viewing history with the hindsight of our times and through a lens coloured by contemporary issues and conflicts (and with a, IMHO, rather peculiar fixation on imperialism). You're projecting modern, Western concepts and perspectives on an entirely different part of the world in an entirely different time. The North-West Frontier was a wild, dangerous and extremely complicated place. You're right to the simple extent that tribal conflict was a continuous problem. However, to say that the Mohmand or the Afridi tribes rose up against the Raj in the 1930s as an example of 'Afghan nationalism' is stretching the truth considerably. Especially since, e.g. the inhabitants of the Kurram Valley repulsed rebelling tribes by fielding a force of 3000 militiamen under British officers.
It's a colloquial name. Like referring to the Commune as Calcutta or the Federation as Hyderabad.
That's definitely not how it was intended to function.
It is the ONLY timeline I can find pertaining to KRTL India.
That's... the oldest timeline and not the one behind the current setup. I suggest you read that one before actually commenting.
Go to google. Write "Kaiserreich, India Timeline" third hit from reddit links to a post of mine from 2018:
Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg
There's also the League of American States but it's kinda boring to me in that it's pretty much the Western Allies of WWII without any direction as to how to get itself entangled in Europe's wars. The League of American States is about protecting the Western Hemisphere, its goal is to not get...
www.alternatehistory.com
In this very thread no less!
OK, but is this official? Is this the actual, official lore for the mod?
And more importantly, your timeline still includes events like the Amritsar massacre that IOTL led to the Indian independence movement becoming irreconcilably split from Britain. Even with Gandhi still halting non-cooperation, that plus the more obvious British weakness SHOULD still critically weaken the loyalists and Home Rule advocates more than OTL, and on top of that, the collapse of Britain should be even more of a credibility blow. Your timeline makes Delhi look like a military regime run by and for traditional elites with a fig leaf of liberalism and loyalty to Ottawa, though at least it has more detail than the ridiculously truncated lore the wiki has.
I think so. Of course I can’t speak for the current team, but it’s the timeline I used when I coded the subcontinent back in the day. To the extent that my work is used in the current build then that’s the lore.
Newsflash: There’s not one, but two rival governments. If that’s not a discredit to the British, then I don’t know what is. Again, I had to walk a tight-rope between creating enough opposition to legitimise the creation of a left wing government in Calcutta and a feudalist/traditionalist one in Hyderabad whilst maintaining Ganga Singh in Delhi.
It is a military government, but with significant civil unrest, which boils over in the aftermath of the Anglo-Indian War. I don’t get where you see the “for and by traditional elites” bit. AFAIR, Jinnah and Besant + the HRL figure pretty widely. But then again, I stopped at 1928 and didn’t have the time to take it all the way to game start.
... Well this answer is not aiming to my argument. I said that it would makes sense since the mod is not using colloquial names like before so it would be a welcome change. Of course there are exceptions like China being called Qing, but these are exceptions.
Yeah, so it is broken now. Every time you move to create the empire, the federation falls into civil war.
Hmm, OK. It's not reflected on the wiki at all.
I mean that the British exiles shouldn't have any sort of influence at all and Delhi shouldn't even be a member of the Entente, because British friendliness has been so comprehensively exposed as a total lie and British power has been so comprehensively broken.
I get that it's a challenging situation to write, but this is again where I think that the legacy lore should be thrown out. A lot of KR's legacy lore is meme-y and implausible, like the Entente in general, Supreme Leader Beria, and pre-rework Ungern Khan, and IMO major reworks absolutely SHOULD include removing legacy elements that are too fun-policey or too implausible. And ESPECIALLY anything that is both implausible and memey, like the whole "Glorious Entente paradise reclaims the birthright!" BS, should be surgically excised.
Thinking some more on this, I'm starting to think that part of my frustration might be that the 3 way civil war is a clash of fun vs. plausible. It requires handwaves to hell and back to exist, but at the same time it's one of the more fun conflicts in KR, and indeed in all HOI4 mods I've played.
I'm not really understanding how the collaborationist liberals have any credibility left, tbh. Even by 1928. I may be biased towards Comrade Gandhi and the INC, but Delhi still frustrates me and tbh your timeline only exacerbates a lot of the issues I've got. Like, the British-in-exile military support, implausible as it already is, comes in the form of straight-up war crimes, how is that helpful to Delhi? If anything, the Commune should be the preeminent power on the subcontinent (with significant internal tensions keeping it distracted), IMO.