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A web-based tool to create national focus trees for your own mods in HOI4
This repo is to serve as a way for backups, improvements, and for people to be able to make pull requests when Paradox create new functions for modding.
This tool is not created by, or on behalf of, Paradox Interactive. The tool will be provided free of charge at hoi4modding.com. The tool does not modify game files, and any issues with the tool will not affect the main game.
Planned features
Contribution info
Your contributions to the project will be greatly appreciated, whether that is a bug report or a pull request.
When creating a bug report please state the bug it the title, the steps to reproduce/steps taken before bug occured, and the web browser (and version, if known) used in the description, e.g:Title: Duplicate focus appears on screenDescription: When I edit a focus and press save a new focus shows, using Internet Explorer 6.(If you use IE6 all bugs come from within your chair)
If you are wondering how you can help make this tool easily accessible for all, and know either CSS or another language, you could help!
Themes can be requested to be added immediately, as the architecture of the site will remain pretty much the same now.Translators will be asked to hold off until the site has become dynamic (available via the web) as all information will then be stored on one file, which will be much easier for translators to work with.
Every Paradox strategy franchise has taken a great leap forward in the last three years, and now, in its fourth instalment, it appears to be Hearts of Ironâs turn. Once again, Paradox are taking a series known for overwhelming detail and complexity and making it more accessible, better-paced, and a whole lot more fun.
Hearts of Iron is the odd-man out for Paradox strategy games. The rest of their games are historical sandboxes where you can radically reshape world history, while Hearts of Iron is fundamentally a wargame. You have a lot of power to reshape World War 2, but ultimately, you still have to fight it.
That narrow focus is refreshing, in a way, after the free-form challenges of Crusader Kings 2 and Europa Universalis 4. In every other Paradox game, you can go with the flow of history, and adapt yourself to changing circumstances. In Hearts of Iron, you have to win or die trying.
The dark valley
The historical problems are immediately recognizable for anyone with a passing interest in World War 2. Britain and France donât want to fight another war and their political establishments are divided. The Soviet Union is crippled by Stalinism, but has tremendous latent power and imperial designs of its own. The United States is mired in a Depression while a rising Japan threatens its Pacific empire. You have a great deal of power to change the course of history, but itâs not unlimited due to these historical realities.
Political capital is probably the most important currency in Hearts of Iron 4, at least before the war. It pays for every kind of decision, from striking diplomatic bargains to promoting generals to setting national policies. You always have to think hard about what your short term goals are, also about what youâre saving your capital for in the next few years.
It accrues quickly or slowly depending on a variety of factors. The Nazi government, with consolidated one-party rule and genius propagandists and demagogues in every direction, accumulates capital very quickly in the early part of the game. The unpopular, basket-case governments of Franceâs Third Republic will struggle to accumulate enough capital to make decisive choices before itâs too late.
However, as you deliver on promises and improve your governmentâs position, more capital flows your way. There is a bit of a snowball-effect when youâre playing well. Royal life magazine missing issues 2017. Likewise, when you are falling short of goals or suffering massive casualties, your capital begins to erode.
Running out of history
In my session, I played as Germany in 1936. War was inevitable, but I still had a lot of major choices that tie into the great what-ifs of World War 2, like whether Germany should delay the war past 1939, so they can develop the heavy tanks and guns they so desperately needed against the Soviets, or develop the long-range bomber fleet they needed to deal with Britain.
This kind of long-term planning is especially important because, at a certain point, there is no more âlong-termâ. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, eventually you stop building the army you want because youâve to go to war with the army youâve got.
I opted to play very conservatively while I figured out HoI4âs systems. As my first national mission, I decided to expand infrastructure in central Germany, rather than more aggressive missions aimed at regaining the lost territories of 1918. I didnât want to panic the French and British.
Instead, I just started building civilian factories in Germanyâs industrial heartland, which themselves started working on improving the national infrastructure. They also produced valuable consumer goods for international trade. I used to those barter with France and the UK for things like rubber, tungsten, and oil. My first panzer armies were effectively sponsored by the western allies.
Arms production is another interesting feature of Hearts of Iron. Itâs a two-step process. First, you have to build the material you need for new units: small arms and artillery for infantry divisions, tanks and armored cars for armored divisions. Only once the stocks of equipment are there can you train a new division.
Thereâs one other wrinkle: the longer you keep a production pipeline operational, the more efficient it becomes. So thereâs incentive to keep purchase levels untouched for a long time. If the same 12 factories are tasked to building Panzer IIs, theyâre going to get really good at building Panzer IIs.
But that conflicts with the with the need to roll-out new equipment. New equipment requires entirely new production lines, which entails a great deal of inefficiency. In my case, while the Panzer III and Panzer IV might have been the future backbones of the German army, I was cranking out Panzer IIs in droves. So I had to think carefully about when and how I wanted to retire them.
All that equipment is used to build new divisions. You can design divisions according to certain templates. Basically, every division has a certain number of sockets for equipment unit types. So you can build a mechanized division thatâs almost entirely comprised of infantry on halftracks supported by towed-artillery, or you can throw some tanks into the mix to make the division a little more general-purpose. Once youâve established your divisional templates, you can start mass-producing them out of your equipment stocks and national manpower reserve.
Ready for war
By 1938, my Germany had an awesome war machine in place. I was able to crank out divisions as fast as the men could be trained. My early decisions to over-invest in manufacturing gave me massive military bandwidth. Now it was time to turn all that raw material into usable field armies.
Hearts of Iron makes army management a joy, which is very good news considering how much there is to manage once the battle is joined. This is a game where hundreds of divisions will do battle along a single front, and you can (if youâre crazy) try and micro manage each one. But itâs far easier, and more enjoyable, to give your army some structure and AI management with the tools in Hearts of Iron 4.
Hoi4 Focus Tree Maker Download
Every nation has a stable of officers with various pros and cons. Germany was pretty lucky in that its officers are overwhelmingly first-rate, so I had lots of options for who could lead my army. My best senior commander was Gerd von Rundstedt, so I placed him in charge of 1st Army Group, who would be the largest army involved in the conquest of Poland.
Putting these armies together and assigning them their places and war plans was a breeze thanks to the interface tools in HoI4. Selecting a few stray divisions and then clicking on an army commander portrait assigns them to that army group.
The best part came when it was time to make invasion plans for Poland. Using a color-coded paint brush for each of my armies, I gave them all assignments for what to do when the war began. For Rundstedtâs mammoth 1st Army Group, I drew a bold red line bifurcating Poland at Warsaw and all the way down to the Czechoslovakian border. I drew a shorter blue line behind Rundstedtâs line of advance, to mark where I wanted my special breakthrough panzer army. Finally, with all the pieces in place, I declared war and told all my armies to execute their war plans.
It looked fantastic. Everything about Heart of Iron has a vaguely somber âwar roomâ vibe that really intensifies once combat begins. The panzers streaked out across the cool, desaturated battle map while infantry plodded along behind and aircraft circled overhead. The Poles were overwhelmed on their border, but started to rally at the gates of Warsaw. The front line started to bend backwards as Rundstedtâs drive stalled, while the rest of his army hit their original objectives south and north of the city.
A late Fall Weiss
My losses were shockingly high, and both my infantry and air force units were badly depleted from the Battle of Warsaw. Nor was it easy to sense how or where those losses occurred. Hearts of Iron doesnât deliver a clear picture of who is winning and at what cost. This bit of feedback might be one of the trickiest things that Hearts of Iron 4 needs to get right: all their other games give you battle reports, because that works for medieval and early modern warfare. But it doesnât work for the constant friction of World War 2âs massive battle fronts.
Still, the Poles were concentrating all their defense around Warsaw, and that was the moment Iâd been waiting for. I grabbed my panzer army under Hermann Hoth and drew a line south of the Polish salient, where I wanted them to form up to attack. Then I drew another line that split the Polish lines and connected with German defenses in East Prussia. In short, Hoth would smash through the Polish position at a weak point and drive north to my line in East Prussia, cutting the Poles off from reinforcements.
That started the avalanche as the Polish position collapsed. From there, the German armies fanned out and seized the rest of Poland. I called a peace conference with all the major combatants (just me and Poland, in this case) an annexed Poland all the way up to the Soviet border.
World War 2 was under way. My losses had been shockingly high, and both my infantry and air force units were badly depleted from the Battle of Warsaw. Iâd done quite a bit worse than Hitler and Manstein had done in 1939.
But it was a tremendous first act, and, considering I was managing one of the largest economies and complex war machines in the 20th century, a surprisingly elegant and intuitive experience. Hearts of Iron 4 did a great job of making sure I knew what I could do and why I might want to do it, so that I was always free to focus on figuring out exactly what I should do. And thatâs exactly what a game like this is all about.
Travel and accommodation were provided by Paradox Interactive.
Last December, a 22-year old modder who calls himself Ted52 purged the Steam forums for his Hearts of Iron IV mod, Millennium Dawn. Steamâs infrastructure made it difficult to remove unsavory threads individually, and he tells me he has more control of things over at his Discord channel, where he can eliminate any racists, idiots, and anti-Semites with reasonable efficiency. Ted seems almost amused by this burden. As someone whoâs found himself in the center of the culture war raging inside of the Hearts of Iron IV mod scene, this is just how things work.
âThe immense toxicity that is developed by these fundamentalistic ideological fronts within the community is where my patience ends,â says Ted, when I interviewed him over Discord last year. âI am not getting paid for any of this, and I canât be bothered to explain to every 15-year-old edgelord who just discovered 4chan last week why fascism is not something I want to see.â
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Hereâs what Ted is referring to: Paradox Studiosâ Hearts of Iron IV simulates the tumultuous political landscape of the early 20th century, from 1933 to 1949. That was an era of fascism, communism, political revolt, and genocide, and the gameâs toolkit lets you play with it all. You could, for instance, take control of the British parliament, plunge it into Nazism, and replace Winston Churchill with the real-life wartime fascist Oswald Mosley. You can also do the same in Germany and build the Marxist, Soviet-sympathizing state that Hitler feared.
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Tedâs work in Millennium Dawn essentially does the same thing, except it simulates the political rumblings of the 21st century. Players can control the Islamic Stateâs caliphate and continue the campaign into Damascus. Or they can pilot the United States, and welcome Jill Stein in as the champion of a new far-left brigade. Ted52 achieves this by reworking the gameâs National Focus system, which allows you to determine exactly which policies and ideologies your state will focus on. But like the rest of Paradoxâs games, some of Tedâs work on Millennium Dawn has been embraced by the fringes of the ultra right-wing. For instance, the leader of the nationalist faction in the United States is Richard Spencer. If you decide to push the country in that direction, heâll be made president. From there, you can pass segregatory legislature, introduce David Duke as a government employee, and rebuild the country as an ethno-nationalist state. This thread, archived from 4Chanâs infamously turgid /pol/ board, features a screenshot of a Spencer regime in North America, saying, âI guess I have no choice other than to secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.â (This is a reference to the 14 Words, a white supremacist slogan.) A few posts down, another user responds: âHearts of Iron 4 Millennium Dawn is awesome. You can focus on racial superiority.â
This attitude is also reflected in Millennium Dawnâs submod scene. Thereâs an edit on Steam that makes Lauren Southern, a YouTuber from British Columbia who projects white nationalist values, the leader of the Canadian Libertarian Party, of which she has been a member of in the past. A few months before last yearâs political upheaval in Zimbabwe, someone released a submod that implemented the unrecognized colonial state of Rhodesia and its deceased Prime Minister Ian Smith back into Africa. (Rhodesia has long been a touchstone for white nationalists. Dylan Roof, the gunman from the Charleston church terror attack, operated a blog called âLast Rhodesian.â)
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This puts Ted in an interesting position. He swears up and down that his mod isnât meant to be digested as a political statement, or a conduit for some sort of Nazi fantasy, but heâs still been inundated with those kind of fans. âIt doesnât feel great,â he says, when his community is overrun by âeither by far-right forces or by trolls pretending to be far-right.â Obliterating the Steam forums, he says, was a necessary first step. Unfortunately, as any fan of Paradox games knows, that air of xenophobia in the scene isnât going anywhere anytime soon.
Thereâs a long history of racist mods for Paradox grand strategy games. Last year the company stomped out mods for its space sim Stellaris that removed people of color from the human factions and advertised itself with the proclamation, âNo multiculturalism here!â Thereâs a mod for Hearts of Iron IV called âAryan Goddess,â designed by the ethnonationalist Taylor Swift fan-site of the same name, which has since been purged from the internet. It makes Swift, in full Nazi regalia, the leader of the Third Reich and includes custom tech-tree options like âBad Bloodâ and â1989,â both of which are adopted from her music. But perhaps the best and most prominent example is the Deus Vult mod, which, according to Steam, has been downloaded 9,210 times.
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Functionally, the mod offers a daffy, puerile interpretation of the 11th and 12th century crusades. One of the most powerful National Focus options in Deus Vult is called âEnslave Saracen.â (âSaracenâ is a Medieval-era catch-all for Arabs and Muslims.) The description of the upgrade reads: âThe purging of all infidels and saracens will take time, by enslaving them we will have a disposable workforce.â Functionally, it boosts your campaignâs construction speed, expediting your conquest of Jerusalem.
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Obviously, Deus Vult directly demeans the Islamic world, which sets it in an entirely different paradigm from nonpartisan works like Tedâs Millennium Dawn. You can only play as one faction in Deus Vult, The Knights Templar, which holds both Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ in its ranks. Thereâs a tech-tree option called âGas, Gas, Gas,â which allows the player to merge their empire with Nazi Germany. âWe and the German Reich have a common enemy,â it states. âTogether we can destroy our antagonists and rule the world!â The player is also given a chance to sympathize with the Middle East in the form of a National Focus called âBecome Infidels.â But it saddles you with a 90 percent debuff to your National Unity, making you easy pickings for any other country that sets their sights on your borders.
The creator of Deus Vult, a Steam user named TauronSS, doesnât divulge any identifying details about himself other than that heâs a âSwedish guyâ who first got interested in Paradox around Hearts of Iron III. âMemes tend to be offensive and absurd,â he writes to me over email. âI like absurd and offensive jokes, no matter what the subject is.â
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Hoi4 Focus Tree Maker Problems
His claim that everything in his work is played for jokes is reflected in the name of the mod. The term âDeus Vultâ is a long-running gag within the Paradox community. In Crusader Kings II, a classic grand strategy game set centuries before Hearts of Iron, the in-game Pope will occasionally declare a holy war on a specific region in the near East. Those announcements are blessed with the incantation âDeus Vult!,â which translates to âGod wills it!â The player musters their troops and sets out on the warpath.
The history of internet verbiage is always complicated, but âDeus Vultâ is now the most iconic phrase in the Paradox dictionary. The term was repurposed into an image macro of a Medieval knight, dressed in a white tabard bearing the Red Cross of Constantine, holding a sword over an unseen infidel. Before long, Deus Vult earned a Pepe-like formalization as an online rallying call for the alt-right. Here is that same crusader chopping through a wooden door, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, to confront a screaming man in a turban cowering in the corner. Here he is again, taking up arms to storm a coffee shop promising â100 percent Arabica beans.â
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The Deus Vult mod maintains the spirit of the meme: itâs over-the-top, zealous, full of genocidal fantasies of religious and racial purity. TauronSS tells me he wanted to create something realistic: âWhat would medieval religious fundamentalists do with heretics? Most likely kill them, or at least severely oppress them.â But when I ask him if he injected any of his own personal politics into the code, he demurs. âIâm just messing around with a meme,â he says.
âIf there are Islamophobes among those who enjoy my mods, then thatâs how it is. I will not start a witch hunt against people who have different political views,â he continues. âIâm just here trying to make enjoyable mods.â
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The makers of these games are aware of the issues but have so far exercised a fairly light touch, partially as a matter of resources and partially as a strategic way to avoid giving extra attention to the worst in their community. Hearts of Iron IV game director Dan Lind told me that in 99 out of 100 cases, Paradox wonât squash out mods for objectionable content, and the company is instead inclined to âlet the community decide whether they want to play a mod or not.â âThere is always a risk that a zero-tolerance approach makes martyrs in a community that has shown itself very able to mobilize petty grievances and overwhelm the conversation,â he says. âIt comes down to observation and intuition in most cases, and whether a mod is using a game as creative context, or as an excuse to offend.â
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Lind describes parsing the space between authentic and sarcastic hyper-nationalism as a âdaily challengeâ for Paradox. The term âkebabâ is banned from the companyâs forums because of its use as a pejorative in the âremove kebabâ meme (which itself is associated with an old Serbian nationalist fight song). Deus Vult, on the other hand, is not banned, which makes sense when you consider the heritage of the term within other Paradoxseries before it was co-opted by the alt-right. âWeâre only so many people here, and sometimes we can be late to discover that a meme within our community has taken on an unfortunate new meaning,â explains Lind.
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Similarly, itâs hard to find many people up in arms about the cultural issues surrounding Paradox games in the community itself. Plenty of Hearts of Iron YouTubers have featuredthe Deus Vult mod on their channel without any serious condemnationâif anything, they seem happy to participate in the supposed joke. You will occasionally find an open discussion about the latent racism in the Paradox community. A Reddit user recently described how he was kicked and blocked from a server after a week of play once the administrator discovered he was nowhite. But there isnât anything resembling a grassroots movement to snuff out thebigotry at its source.
To be clear, Deus Vult is an extreme example, but that hypernationalism seems to tail everyone whoâs making mods in this scene, sometimes in unexpected ways. Look at Fall of Islam, built by a Canadian named Tiago. The title of the mod might come off a little charged, but in practice itâs a fleshed-out alternative history module of Europa Universalis IV that imagines the medieval world if Byzantium never fell to the Ottoman Empire. âIn 1444, Arabia has shattered, caused by the many schisms of the faith,â the description reads. âWill you help the Arabs rise again in the name of the Allah and His Prophet, or will you deliver the final blow to his followers?â
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The Fall of Islam is polished with a distinct history-nerd touch. A Zoroastrian Persia! A Coptic Egypt! If youâre a fan of medieval history, itâs a fascinating, studiously arranged conceptualization of what the map mightâve looked like if the caliphates failed. The vast majority of Tiagoâs players seem to digest his work that way, but unfortunately, you can also find comments on the Steam Workshop page that celebrate the mod as a way to actualize ethno-nationalist visions.
âThis is how the world should look.â
âRemoving kebab from the entire world? Sign me up.â
âNice, wish it turned out that way.â
Sep 23, 2014 - mp3 320 kbps 269 MB UL OB TB. Before becoming a solo star, Rory Gallagher fronted the blues-rock trio Taste, which experienced. Jun 16, 2015 - Tech Finance Politics Strategy Life All. When you turn on the 'high quality streaming' option, the stream opens up to 320 kbps. Yet, 96 kbps audio sounds a little thin for my taste, especially for bass heavy tracks, so I. The Sync quality is when you download songs onto your smartphone's local. 320 kbps youtube to mp3 converter. Oct 28, 2015 - First page of the Taste archive. Taste â What's Going On: Live At The Isle Of Wight Festival 1970 (2015). Taste (Rory Gallagher) â Stratology (2014). Mp3 320 kbps 269 MB UL OB TB.
Tiago references those interpretations on Fall of Islamâs Steam landing page: âTo my Muslim friends, take no offense to this mod! Consider it a challenge!â In the next line he writes, âFor everyone else, Deus Vult!â Sure enough, he tells me heâs dealt with angry comments from Muslim users, including a few written in Turkish that he canât understand. He either ignores them or tries to explain how his mod isnât meant to be read as a political treatise or a historical rightening. â[My mod] is free for anyone to use however they wish, whether it is to do a Zoroastrian Persia world conquest, a Shia caliphate world conquest or an Orthodox Byzantium world conquest,â says Tiago. âHeck, go for a Buddhist, German-culture, Mali empire run for all I care.â
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Hoi4 Focus Tree Icons
As for the other, more Islamophobic comments, Tiago leaves most of them untouched on Fall of Islamâs page, he says, out of a firm belief in freedom of speech. Sure, if a user is a problem and repeatedly espouses racist views, heâll block them, but generally Tiago believes The Fall of Islamâs community should act as a meritocracy. He feels no responsibility to serve as the moral compass for the people who enjoy his work.
âWith the world being so politically polarized at the moment, I can see why my mod wouldnât, shall we say, help the situation,â he continues. âHowever, I made this mod simply for fun and being able to play the game I love with a different starting scenario.
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âThere needs to be more civil, rational discussions than ever before. We need to be able to be less âbutt-hurtâ at everything and listen to the other side for once. You can disagree, and thatâs perfectly fine, but there needs to be communication. Simply blocking people you disagree with can only make the wall taller for both sides, which is a great disservice.â
Out of everyone I spoke to, Ted52 remains the only creator who took tangible action to eliminate the racist presence in his modâs community. The Millennium Dawn Discord channel is curated and mostly tasteful, and clearly Ted believes that the tenor of the community is a personal responsibility, rather than an uncontrollable state of nature. âI have long lost my idealism of bettering people,â he tells me. âInstead, we have set out community rules, with âdonât be a douchebagâ the most important one, and if you break that one rule, the banhammer might fall on your forehead.â
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Mod scenes are known for their lack of ombudsmanship. That is what makes them special and bizarre. Nobody advocates for publisher approval for everything that passes through the Steam workshop, but it is odd how the far-right undertow in Paradox games has been left unchecked. The people I spoke to for this story all confirmed its existence with a half-shrugged sense of normalcy, as if itâs something that hasnât been shocking in a long, long time.
It reminds me of a post Ted made on the Paradox Plazasubreddit last November, responding to a thread expressing concern about the number of âassholesâ in the Paradox community. âTankies, wehraboos and just straight up neo-fascists are all to be found among us, that is true,â Ted wrote. âBeneath all that, you will find the great majority of Paradox games players [are] a lovable bunch of people who are connected by their common interest in history, war-deciding dice rolls, dubious combat mechanics, dubious AI, sniffing Swedish video game developers and all the Deus Vult memes you can handle. This is our community, and if we want to have fewer assholes within it, we should work on getting more nice people on board and getting more people to be nice.â
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Ted52's logic is sound, but exiling neo-fascists takes more than sentiment. That kind of progress is not achieved by neutrality or meekness, nor the belief that social responsibility is fundamentally detached from video games. Are modders responsible for how their work is interpreted? Do people like Tiago or Ted need to include a disclaimer to educate the angry people in their wake? Does alternative history need to be challenged beyond the merits of its own grotesque imagination? So far, the answer has been no.
Luke Winkie is a writer and former pizza maker from San Diego, currently living in Brooklyn. In addition to Kotaku, he contributes to Vice, PC Gamer, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and Polygon.
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