Paradox Grand Strategy: Tim Cook? How many divisions has he got?

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BBJoey: Oct 31, 2012

It's really funny that people consistently bring up Decisive Campaigns Barbarossa as a good example of acknowledging war crimes because if you read the actual text of the game, it's basically perpetrating the clean Wehrmacht. The military officers you deal with, in particular your immediate superior von Brauchitsch, are represented as being various levels of appalled to disquieted by the war crimes they become aware of. Brauchitsch is a particularly good example because there's multiple events where he offers to run interference, or even recommends for example being more humane to PoWs; in real life, he was a spineless aristocrat who actively took part in the ethnic cleansing of Poland. The game explicitly presents the war as the bad guys (Nazis who want to do bad things) and the good guys (Wehrmacht officers who just want a good clean war). also the guy you're explicitly playing as in the game crafted the Commissar and Barbarossa Decrees.

Having said that I still like DCB, but it's not some kind of model for how to soberly reflect the realities of the complicity of the Wehrmacht in Nazi crimes. If you make a game where you have some level of oversight of the Nazi military apparatus the reality is the player character is intrinsically implicit in war crimes. Personally I feel that creating a game mechanic where you can "fight back" against the genocidal nature of the war is honestly somewhat in poor taste, because the idea of senior Nazi officers pushing for better treatment of PoWs or withholding support from anti-partisan efforts is a fantasy much more removed from reality than even the wildest alt-history focus path.

# ? Sep 14, 2021 08:20

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# ? May 11, 2024 16:05

Raskolnikov38: Mar 3, 2007; We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

Crazy Joe Wilson posted:

American Education tends to do an okay job teaching about Nazi genocide and atrocities but a piss poor job about Soviet/Communist state genocides and atrocities.

thx for personally demonstrating this with your post

# ? Sep 14, 2021 08:56

Pyromancer: Apr 29, 2011; This man must look upon the fire, smell of it, warm his hands by it, stare into its heart

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

Germany was by far the worst but most people know about it (and far too many deny it) meanwhile Stalin gets treated as a gentleman that was friends with FDR in history books.

So? The gentlemen from UK just starved couple million Bengalis in 43, and gentlemen from USA considered other races subhuman for years even after the war ended. They wouldn't be friendly with Stalin because potential communist uprising in their country concerned them, not because they cared about some genocide.

# ? Sep 14, 2021 09:00

Yaoi Gagarin: Feb 20, 2014

Raskolnikov38 posted:

thx for personally demonstrating this with your post

The strangest thing is that you would expect the US school system to lay into the gulags and the famine in Ukraine and the great leap forward and all that for propaganda. I learned about it in world history class, 9th grade, in California, which doesn't even have as much of anti-communist hardon as the rest of the country

# ? Sep 14, 2021 09:08

Angry Salami: Jul 27, 2013; Don't trust the skull.

Jazerus posted:

playing as germany should make you hate hitler even more because he's constantly loving up the war effort. just endless bullshit that gets in the way of winning. you aren't really even "changing history" in an idle alt-hist kind of way if you don't have to contend with the same obstacles that germany actually did contend with

Instead of getting more production when you switch to a total war economy, Germany should start getting reduced resources as more and more factories are assigned to 'War Crimes' and 'Wunderwaffe'.

# ? Sep 14, 2021 09:49

RabidWeasel: Aug 4, 2007; Cultures thrive on their myths and legends...and snuggles!

Vizuyos posted:

It's hard to escape when the start date is 1936 and the player gets control over industrial development. The player knows WWII is coming, and so no matter what country they play, they'll pursue expanding their industry and building up their military way harder than most countries actually did historically in that period. Especially since HoI4 is a pure wargame where that's all you can really do in peacetime anyway aside from waiting for focuses to run.

It's a design problem any WWII game has to deal with, and the more power and freedom is given to the player, the more things have to be railroaded or restricted to keep a historical-ish WWII possible.

The real spoiler is that WW2 is actually a crap setting for a Paradox-style GSG for a lot of reasons, RIP ever getting that cold war game

# ? Sep 14, 2021 10:27

vanity slug: Jul 20, 2010

could we ignore the boring rehashed "hoi is a genocide simulator" discussion and go back to the sparkling new "paradox is run by sex pests" storyline? because jesus christ, yikes

# ? Sep 14, 2021 10:53

Panzeh: Nov 27, 2006; "..The high ground"

BBJoey posted:

It's really funny that people consistently bring up Decisive Campaigns Barbarossa as a good example of acknowledging war crimes because if you read the actual text of the game, it's basically perpetrating the clean Wehrmacht. The military officers you deal with, in particular your immediate superior von Brauchitsch, are represented as being various levels of appalled to disquieted by the war crimes they become aware of. Brauchitsch is a particularly good example because there's multiple events where he offers to run interference, or even recommends for example being more humane to PoWs; in real life, he was a spineless aristocrat who actively took part in the ethnic cleansing of Poland. The game explicitly presents the war as the bad guys (Nazis who want to do bad things) and the good guys (Wehrmacht officers who just want a good clean war). also the guy you're explicitly playing as in the game crafted the Commissar and Barbarossa Decrees.

Having said that I still like DCB, but it's not some kind of model for how to soberly reflect the realities of the complicity of the Wehrmacht in Nazi crimes. If you make a game where you have some level of oversight of the Nazi military apparatus the reality is the player character is intrinsically implicit in war crimes. Personally I feel that creating a game mechanic where you can "fight back" against the genocidal nature of the war is honestly somewhat in poor taste, because the idea of senior Nazi officers pushing for better treatment of PoWs or withholding support from anti-partisan efforts is a fantasy much more removed from reality than even the wildest alt-history focus path.

This is true- the hunger plan, while it was never truly implemented to the full degree, was devised by OKH itself, and there was no meaningful opposition to it in principle. This was quite literally a plan for mass death- to starve out most of the urban population of the occupied USSR so the food produced there could be used by Germans instead of feeding urban population. It was basically universally supported among the German officer corps at all levels as part of the whole ideological project, even past the Nazis themselves. The only reason it stopped to some extent was a need for slave labor and the impracticality of actually completely cutting off food shipments to major cities(it just scattered people into the countryside instead).

I think this is why most games avoid the topic entirely, trying to operate at a higher level of abstraction so as not to necessarily need to depict it in detail. The need of games to have 'interesting decisions' runs against accurate portrayals of things of this sort. For example, I believe in a HOI4 mod the Holocaust is represented by an event where either you do it and lose manpower or don't and lose stability. But this kind of framing, while making it a game decision, implies that the Jewish population of Germany was a destabilizing force, which is an incredibly Nazi viewpoint. It's probably, in this case, better not to go there at all.

# ? Sep 14, 2021 11:00

Edgar Allen Ho: Apr 3, 2017; by sebmojo

I'm an ashkenazi jew, so I'm biased and going to remain so until I'm dead myself, but what's weird in HoI is that it doesn't shy away at all from depicting the USSR doing mass murders, apartheid South Africa, Nanjing, etc but god forbid depict the nazis as anything bad.

SnoochtotheNooch posted:

I get it, a lot of people hate the US post 1950, but this is just wrong. WW2 is the direct result of WW1, Hitler killing off a shitload of Jews in the background is just the ideological replay of many pogroms of the past which is why there's a word for it.

And both the nazis and WW1 are direct results of Germany being united by "an army with a state." But Paradox and the fan base, by all accounts, absolutely loving love Prussia and unironically think the horrific militarist propaganda about the prussian army is 100% reality.

Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 11:16 on Sep 14, 2021

# ? Sep 14, 2021 11:13

hot cocoa on the couch: Dec 8, 2009

Jeoh posted:

could we ignore the boring rehashed "hoi is a genocide simulator" discussion and go back to the sparkling new "paradox is run by sex pests" storyline? because jesus christ, yikes

last i heard they were trying to get a "do sex crimes" button added to ck3

# ? Sep 14, 2021 12:11

TheMcD: May 4, 2013; Monaca / Subject N 2024
---------
Despair will never let you down.
Malice will never disappoint you.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

I'm an ashkenazi jew, so I'm biased and going to remain so until I'm dead myself, but what's weird in HoI is that it doesn't shy away at all from depicting the USSR doing mass murders, apartheid South Africa, Nanjing, etc but god forbid depict the nazis as anything bad.

Just to repeat myself from earlier in the thread, you can display the USSR doing mass murders and still sell the game in Russia. You can display apartheid South Africa and sell the game in South Africa. You can display Nanjing and still sell the game in Japan. I'm not convinced you can have the Holocaust in game as a thing Germany, and by extension therefore the player, is doing and still sell the game in Germany.

In Wolfenstein recently, the developers had to censor all mentions of Jews from the game in the German censored version, so now not-Hitler was just killing "traitors". And this was in a situation where it's about depicting what the villain of the game is doing, not the ostensible protagonist by way of being player controlled.

Like, others may disagree, but I can absolutely see a large shitstorm getting loose in Germany over Paradox turning HoI4 into "the game where you do the Holocaust" in public perception, even if all the events that display those events were outright cut from the German version, and that is a headache I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

Especially given that Paradox is clearly already tightrope walking along German authorities' ideas of what is off limits with the current censoring, which has Shadow Realm Hitler (alongside Himmler, G�ring, Goebbels and He�), censoring multiple event pictures to remove those aforementioned five, removing the SS skull insignias from portraits (I suppose the swastikas are one step too far in general and so they're not even in the uncensored version, but SS insignia are not?), and editing event texts to make them less fascist, like so:

Uncensored posted:

political.7.d:0 "'The [Root.GetAdjective] people have a noble history, a history they've been made to forget under the weak and cowardly rule of [Root.GetRulingParty]! They claim to represent the people, but can so feeble a state enforce the will of the people? Only by spilling the blood of these traitors can we fulfill our destiny!'\n\nThe fascist speakers in [Root.GetName] have made no secret of what they think of our current rulership and political system. Speeches like these have tapped into a public dissent that is particularly pronounced in the more conservative sections of the military."

political.8.d:0 "Several high-ranking members of the [Root.GetAdjective] military have expressed support, some privately and some openly, for the Fascist movement in [Root.GetName]. They feel the [Root.GetRulingParty] has forgotten how important discipline and patriotism is to keeping the country together, and are increasingly annoyed by the army being treated by the government as more of a tool than a one of the nation's most important institutions. Some of them go as far as to suggest that a new government is needed, one that knows how to lead [Root.GetName] with strength and tradition into the next half of the century.\n\nThis faction may not predominantly be politicians, but some of them have gained positions in the department of defense. If these developments continue, they may have sufficient political support to execute a coup."

political.10.d:0 "While the attempts of the fascist movement to revitalize the people's pride in their nation have seen some success, the resistance against these ideas remains high. The generals plotting to overthrow the current administration are disappointed in the lack of confidence the [Root.GetAdjective] population themselves seem to have in [Root.GetAdjective] superiority.\n\nThey remain certain that the people will eventually tire of [Root.GetLeader]'s lies, but are divided on what course of action to take. Some call for a coup to be executed now, before [Root.GetName]'s enemies takes advantage of its weakness. However, doing so while public support is limited would plunge the nation into civil war. Greatness can scarcely be achieved without spilling blood, but the blood of our countrymen, even traitors to the cause, is precious."

Censored posted:

political.7.d:1 "'The [Root.GetAdjective] people have been subjected too long to the incompetent rule of [Root.GetRulingParty]! They claim to represent the people, but fail to even keep our streets in order! Only by removing them from power can we make this nation grow!'\n\nThe fascist speakers in [Root.GetName] have made no secret of what they think of our current rulership and political system. Speeches like these have tapped into a public dissent that is particularly pronounced in the more conservative sections of the military."

political.8.d:1 "Several high-ranking members of the [Root.GetAdjective] military have expressed support, some privately and some openly, for the Fascist movement in [Root.GetName]. They feel the [Root.GetRulingParty] has forgotten how important force of arms is to keeping the country together, and are increasingly annoyed by the army being treated by the government as more of a tool than a one of the nation's most important institutions. Some of them go as far as to suggest that a new government is needed, one that knows how to lead [Root.GetName] into the next half of the century.\n\nThis faction may not predominantly be politicians, but some of them have gained positions in the department of defense. If these developments continue, they may have sufficient political support to execute a coup."

political.10.d:1 "While the attempts of the fascist movement to revive nationalistic sentiment have seen some success, the resistance against these ideas remains high. The generals plotting to overthrow the current administration are disappointed in the lack of confidence the [Root.GetAdjective] population themselves seem to have in [Root.GetFascistParty].\n\nThey remain certain that the people will eventually tire of [Root.GetLeader], but are divided on what course of action to take. Some call for a coup to be executed now, before [Root.GetName]'s enemies take action. However, doing so while public support is limited would plunge the nation into civil war."

I will blame Paradox for a lot of things. Not wanting to open this particular can of worms and just punting on the whole matter is not one of them. Especially since I'm pretty sure there's quite a market for HoI4 in Germany, given a certain predisposition towards Wehraboos here. As far as I'm concerned, this is a business decision because of a situation that is beyond an individual company to change.

# ? Sep 14, 2021 12:36

Alchenar: Apr 9, 2008

Nobody is ever going to make a game where the player's objective is to make the holocaust happen. Yes it is a bit inconsistent with how the world treats other atrocities. No that's not going to make a difference.

# ? Sep 14, 2021 13:08

fuf: Sep 12, 2004; haha

wasn't there a board game where you spend the whole game designing train routes and then at the end the big reveal is that the trains are carrying people to concentration camps?

# ? Sep 14, 2021 13:14

Grevlek: Jan 11, 2004

fuf posted:

wasn't there a board game where you spend the whole game designing train routes and then at the end the big reveal is that the trains are carrying people to concentration camps?

Railroad Tycoon 2: Platinum Edition

# ? Sep 14, 2021 13:21

shades of blue: Sep 27, 2012

PittTheElder posted:

Yea the Holocaust in the popular imagination (and in technical terms) is all about the murder of Jews specifically, but Jewish victims only make up about half of the Nazi murder victims (ie. excluding allied KIAs).

Yeah just your classic reminder that the Porajmos was at a similar scale to the Holocaust. Moreover, antiziganism is still just as prevalent now as it was 100 years ago. The extent of it legitimately can't be overstated - some of the most recent European polls on people's opinion about Romani people featured such incredible responses as 83% of Italian respondents having a negative view of Romani folks (and in fact the only countries that didn't have an outright majority with negative views were Germany and France, with 37% and 44% respectively) or a survey of the whole European Union said that 20% of respondents would refuse to work with a Romani person. It's actually insane that there was this industrialized genocide perpetrated on a group of people and afterwards literally nothing changed. There are still pogroms and walls built between Romani populations and other populations, not metaphorically, all over Europe.

# ? Sep 14, 2021 13:53

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

fuf posted:

wasn't there a board game where you spend the whole game designing train routes and then at the end the big reveal is that the trains are carrying people to concentration camps?

You're thinking of the game Train, but rather, the game doesn't explicitly say it's about the holocaust at any point. The game however is played on tracks placed over a literal broken window, using rules typed up on a 1940s german typewriter and you're putting a whole bunch of yellow pawns into trains. After you load up one train to its destination, you draw one of the destination cards with the name of a death camp on it, and that's supposedly the reveal that you're playing a game about the holocaust, but if you didn't realise what you were playing when you sat down to play this, well:

# ? Sep 14, 2021 13:56

Mans: Sep 14, 2011; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Sampatrick posted:

Yeah just your classic reminder that the Porajmos was at a similar scale to the Holocaust. Moreover, antiziganism is still just as prevalent now as it was 100 years ago. The extent of it legitimately can't be overstated - some of the most recent European polls on people's opinion about Romani people featured such incredible responses as 83% of Italian respondents having a negative view of Romani folks (and in fact the only countries that didn't have an outright majority with negative views were Germany and France, with 37% and 44% respectively) or a survey of the whole European Union said that 20% of respondents would refuse to work with a Romani person. It's actually insane that there was this industrialized genocide perpetrated on a group of people and afterwards literally nothing changed. There are still pogroms and walls built between Romani populations and other populations, not metaphorically, all over Europe.

We euros like to make fun of Americans and their blatant racism but I wouldn't be surprised if half of Europe wouldn't cheer if police started shooting Roma people in public.

They lost literally everything and the survivors were scattered throughout Europe with nothing, no recognition or support. And then we complain about how they're suspicious of outsiders.

# ? Sep 14, 2021 14:19

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Every time I've played Germany in HOI4, it was after the expansion which lets you do a coup against Hitler and play alt-history Democratic Germany, because gently caress playing as Hitler.

# ? Sep 14, 2021 14:20

Crazycryodude: Aug 15, 2015; Lets get our X tons of Duranium back!

....Is that still a valid thing to jingoistically blow out of proportion?