Alternate History Kaiserreich, dead futures and hope in the 21st century by Nilokeras on nationstates forum

Bassoe

Well-known member
Another essay someone wrote on another site, which I thought worth crossposting for discussion.
Kaiserreich dead futures and hope in the 21st century by Nilokeras said:
Inspired by a diversion that was far more interesting than the actual thread conversation.

As the title suggests, this discussion is about Kaiserreich - a mod for the Paradox video game Hearts of Iron IV. For those unaware, Hearts of Iron is a strategy game that allows the user to take the helm of a given nation starting in the early 20th century and steer it through the storms and currents of WW2, with a relatively in depth treatment of war and politics that allows for a near-infinite number of potential weird and interesting outcomes, from the Axis winning WW2 to the ascension of Greater Albania to become world hegemon. Kaiserreich expands on this even further, creating an alternate history where the Triple Alliance won WW1, leading France and the UK to fall to socialist revolution amidst a flurry of butterfly effect consequences like an early Indian independence struggle, a stable liberal Russian Republic following the early death of Lenin and a second American civil war.

Kaiserreich has also generated a second life for itself outside of being a good video game mod by becoming the seed for new political formations. Most prominently this includes syndicalism, a previously-obscure variant of trade unionism brought to light because of its success in the mod's version of history and effective dominance in the socialist France and the UK that has now become a meme in its own right, with people across the internet calling themselves 'syndicalists' and adopting the mod's imagery as part of their own politics. This phenomena isn't restricted to the left either: Huey Long, a Southern populist cut down by an assassination in the 1930's in real life has also seen a rebirth in interest, and the persistence of the Austro-Hungarian and German monarchies into a more modern age has given the 'trads' fodder of their own for fantasy.

While I think there's plenty of room for (imo justified) dunking on the kind of people who call themselves syndicalists on their Twitter profiles and spend all day retweeting pictures of 1930s Roter Frontkämpferbund street fighting with a caption of 'god I wish that were me', I think it's more interesting to think about why it is this mod for a niche strategy game has so much online cachet clear across the political spectrum. My personal pet theory is that Kaiserreich's timeline represents a unique wellspring of hope for people: a snapshot of a history that for many people is both enticingly plausible and considerably better than the one that we actually live in. Those who looked at Trump and had visions of a populist conservatism can look to Huey Long's success and see a coherent vision of what they wished Trump could be. Socialists depressed by the USSR's smothering of radical leftist traditions and the struggles of the modern left to birth itself can look at a vibrant UK and France where Marx's predictions came true. Monarchists jaded by democratic politics can look to the Triple Alliance powers as modern expressions of an entirely extinct political tradition.

All of them are reactions to I think is the defining atmosphere of politics today: a stifling staleness, a sense that history has ground to a halt amidst the unending triumph of neoliberal 'better things aren't possible' centrist politics across the West. It reminds me in many ways of Phillip K Dick's novel The Man in The High Castle, where the characters in their own alternate history cannot shake the impression of wrongness in their own timeline, revealed through the novel's in universe counterpart fictional book telling of an Allied victory in WW2. The great challenge for people across the spectrum coming in the 21st century is to find ways to break through that choking plastic wrap future and create alternatives to the way things have to be to inspire concrete action - and it seems that strategy game mods is one way to do that.

What sayest thou, NSG? Did the wrong side win WW1? Do you think every man should be a king? What does this mod's success as a bundle of ideas say about our terminally online political discourse?
Not specifically the ideas that the world of the Kaiserreich timeline is any better off than ours or arguments about its plausibility, but the notion that we've somehow ended up on a timeline where the economic globalism ruled by megacorps faction won to the point where it has no credible challengers save for the total collapse of civilization from resource exhaustion and wondering, 'did things have to turn out like this?
Punished UMN said:
Nah, I think he's right. Fantasy and alt-history settings have often been linked to a longing for something gone, and oftentimes that is from a mourning over the present, where it seems there is no hope, that a capitalist world-order has conquered, that any resistance to it is futile, and even that it may destroy civilization rather than change. And part of the reason for that is that the last great war of history won by a handful of centrist liberal countries who were bystanders for the most part, and that the "final enemy" ended up being a cartoonish caricature of right-wing politics followed by a stagnant bureaucratic state rife with corruption, made it worse, because there was never a viable alternative to this. The victory of the liberal-capitalist mode of production is so total and complete that most are not even able to conceive of an alternative or how it might work, and questioning the basis of it is labeled extremism.

Of course Kaiserreich is popular because it's fun, but part of the reason it's fun is because, unlike our timeline, there isn't a major figure who is just a caricature of every antisocial idea of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the major players on all sides are all fighting for something that a lot of people would see as admirable in some way, even if they don't agree with it. Now there are some loons in Kaiserreich like Pelley in the AUS, Codreanu in Romania, and the mad White baron in Mongolia, but for the most part, you're not going to end up with a war between vaguely centrist, wishy-washy liberals and the most insane genocidal ideology imaginable./URL]
Thoughts?
 
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Circle of Willis

Well-known member
Hard to argue otherwise, IMO. When I was a teenager and just starting to think about politics at all, cyberpunk dystopias were all the rage; mega-corps with private armies of cyborgs and heartless mercenaries, government conspiracies led by villainous officials who also happened to be badasses in their own right, cool hovercars, holographic/robotic waifus, and perpetual rain. Toward the end of my teen years and as I started checking out more overtly right-wing-tinted fiction, a different but still compelling dystopia emerged; one where the good guys tended to be survivalists in the backwoods trying to not die as deadly government agents, soldiers and drones closed in on them from all sides, or they're rogue agents alternately dodging and fighting badass and competent conspiracies with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

But instead of any Deus Ex-like future, we seem to have gotten trapped in the soypunk timeline instead. We've got corps like Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter and online mobs rampaging on the aforementioned sites that indulge in totalitarian surveillance, unfair enforcement of rules aimed at political rivals and relentless pushing of ads & narratives, but are also triggered by the mere sight of titties or naked skin. The mobs don't just attack enemies of the state, they care way too much what people think or what they write about on their social media to the point that they will attempt online lynchings over it if the intended victim doesn't (and/or does, it never actually matters!) fall to their knees and apologize profusely enough for having committed even entirely accidental and trivial wrongthink, like putting a certain hairstyle on their character in a videogame. We have luxuries unimaginable just fifty or even twenty years ago at our fingertips, and yet it's made our social lives more toxic and chained us to the powers that be more badly than ever. Even the government conspiracies and deep states are so dreary and led by such bland yet insufferable & uncharismatic figureheads that you'd be called out for building strawmen if they didn't actually exist and you wrote them into your book or game or movie; Alexander Vindman's no Walton Simons who will come after you with a plasma rifle for screwing up his plans one too many times and Nancy Pelosi isn't a Maggie Chow who'd risk her life in a face-to-face swordfight against you in an above top-secret laboratory.

I recall someone else (don't quite remember who) saying something along these lines on a different forum a long time ago: ours is a crayon-colored world filled with ball pits, crying low-testosterone manchildren, ponies, furries and ugly transsexuals, where insulting these people or getting their pronoun wrong on the Internet is considered hate speech and a criminal act worse than committing murder for which you can absolutely get fired, deplatformed, your friends & family turned against you, and in general have your life destroyed by a horde of screeching online banshees. How could anyone with any imagination not look at the current state of the world and think 'did things have to turn out like this?', as you say, at least once?

It's like that apparent unironic Syndicalist poster below one of the people you quoted said, 'escapism and wish fulfillment are human constants', and my God do the times we live in make escapism and wish fulfillment really attractive! Even if for some reason you wanted to live in a dystopia, this one is just so utterly ridiculous and unfun that you'd pass on it if you had any taste at all. Current-year reality is like the eighth season of Game of Thrones compared to The Room of even some worse & less logical fictional dystopias, like the ones you could find in the average YA novel from the mid-2010s - so mindnumbingly bad and dreary that it sails into 'so bad it's good' territory, then keeps going until it loops back into 'it's just so, SO bad'-land.

As for Kaiserreich itself, it stopped being fun when the devs started taking themselves too seriously and selectively ripping out the bits that made the older versions fun in the name of 'realism' while also ramping up the far-left agendaposting, none of which is held to the same scrutiny. Hence why the Mad Baron isn't particularly mad anymore and definitely can't declare himself Genghis II before going on a conquering spree, but the Combined Syndicates can implement 21st-century metropolitan sexual morality with Magnus Hirschfeld leading the charge and also eliminate racism in a dirt poor, civil-war-torn 1930s America with a few 60-day focuses, and why William Pelley is the way he is despite there being no Hitler or Nazism ensuring that his politics would look completely different than IRL. They've also trapped themselves in a cycle of endless reworks of older content (all too often making said content worse & less fun, like that Mongolia example) and putting out content for minors that realistically only a handful of people will play for more than a few minutes, such as Kumul or Assyria.

Honestly, at this point I'd personally recommend just playing Darkest Hour Kaiserreich, Kaiserredux, or if that's too wacky then Home of the Brave, without which I find the KR 2ACW to be so cringeworthy as to be unplayable. Can't have an American Caesar without an American Triumvirate first, after all. Also the latter's devs are working on content outside America, titled 'The World Set Free', which is looking to be a promising middle ground between fun and 'serious realism'.
 

Val the Moofia Boss

Well-known member

My guess as to why the mod became popular is that the title has broad appeal. It directly puts Prussia front and center in the title. Prussians are aesthetically cool. Regal palaces. Dashing men in uniforms with bushy mustaches with a sword at their side and capes. And their successors the Nazis made it cool to be evil, with Triumph of the Will's imagery having become the bedrock of cool bad guy armies in pop culture for almost a century, with wide shots of rows and rows of men wearing fabulous uniforms, saluting in unison... an awesome presentation of strength and group identity. "Don't you want to wear a cool uniform like that? Don't you want to be apart of this vast, invincible cool army, fighting with your comrades and serving a charismatic leader?". There is a reason why the Galactic Empire and Zeon and countless other empires that riff Triumph of the Will and Prussia are extremely popular, despite being morally evil. Even if the mod lets you play as other nations, the title "Kaisereich" means that when people first think of it, they're going to conjure this imagery up. To some people, it's perhaps a wish fulfillment fantasy that you can join the cool empire and be successful (since Germany isn't destroyed in this timeline).

So the title "Kaiserreich" has much more broad appeal than if the mod had been called "Alternate history WW2 mod". The title draws in a lot of people upon first glance. Even if people stick around to look up the interesting IRL concepts behind this alternate history, most people probably would never have learned about that stuff in the first place if it wasn't for the appealing title and premise about Prussians and "glorious" Germans in WW2, even if that's not actually reflective of the content of the mod/alt timeline.


The posters in the linked thread also seem to think that Kaissereich is popular because... it's more optimistic than our current reality? Personally, when I browse the Alternate History forum, it seems that the most popular timelines are darker timelines, where things went worse than it did OTL. Stuff like "The Anglo-American Nazi War" (in which the war in Europe drags out and becomes more horrific, and the British deploy anthrax and rend huge swathes of Europe permanently unhabitable), or "Decisive Darkness", in which Operation Downfall proceeds and Japan gets a horribly prolonged, brutal death and the US becomes a brutal empire, or "Until Every Drop is Paid" in which there is no clean surrender in the American Civil War and it devolves into decades of guerilla fighting. Readers seem to be attracted to disaster scenarios. Or maybe they like the idea of the protagonists fighting against overwhelming odds.

Honestly, at this point I'd personally recommend just playing Darkest Hour Kaiserreich, Kaiserredux, or if that's too wacky then Home of the Brave, without which I find the KR 2ACW to be so cringeworthy as to be unplayable. Can't have an American Caesar without an American Triumvirate first, after all. Also the latter's devs are working on content outside America, titled 'The World Set Free', which is looking to be a promising middle ground between fun and 'serious realism'.

Are the older versions of the Kaissereich mod still available?
 
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ATP

Well-known member
Another essay someone wrote on another site, which I thought worth crossposting for discussion.

Not specifically the ideas that the world of the Kaiserreich timeline is any better off than ours or arguments about its plausibility, but the notion that we've somehow ended up on a timeline where the economic globalism ruled by megacorps faction won to the point where it has no credible challengers save for the total collapse of civilization from resource exhaustion and wondering, 'did things have to turn out like this?
Thoughts?

Yes,they could.

1.First - they could go worst if commies actually take over the world,which was possible.
2.They could go better if catholic Kings keep power in France and Spain,Bavaria would become free state after WW1,and Poland would not be taken by Piłsudzki.
Unfortunatelly,after WW2 there were two options only - soviets and megacorps.
 

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
Are the older versions of the Kaissereich mod still available?
Unfortunately the last link I had for the 0.11 version went dead last year, and I have yet to find new ones for that version or other older ones. However, Home of the Brave/World Set Free is a standalone based on an older version of KR4 - I believe 0.14, since it doesn't have the Ottoman or National France reworks (the devs take issue with what the base KR devs did in that regard and are making a rework of the Frances into their first project for World Set Free, I believe) - so you could look into that, if you don't mind the overhaul they made to the 2ACW. Which I personally don't, it's a huge improvement over the base KR war IMO.

Also, Darkest Hour Kaiserreich is still trucking along slowly, if you want a truly close-to-the-HOI2-original KR experience: theirs can be downloaded straight from their thread on the Paradox forum.
 

Navarro

Well-known member
The posters in the linked thread also seem to think that Kaissereich is popular because... it's more optimistic than our current reality? Personally, when I browse the Alternate History forum, it seems that the most popular timelines are darker timelines, where things went worse than it did OTL. Stuff like "The Anglo-American Nazi War" (in which the war in Europe drags out and becomes more horrific, and the British deploy anthrax and rend huge swathes of Europe permanently unhabitable), or "Decisive Darkness", in which Operation Downfall proceeds and Japan gets a horribly prolonged, brutal death and the US becomes a brutal empire, or "Until Every Drop is Paid" in which there is no clean surrender in the American Civil War and it devolves into decades of guerilla fighting. Readers seem to be attracted to disaster scenarios. Or maybe they like the idea of the protagonists fighting against overwhelming odds.

I mean, one of the very most popular timelines is "Reds!" which is literally about the world being divided up between communist "utopias" in the US and Russia with a strawman Franco-British Union there to put up some ineffectual resistance. So I would say you get both utopias and dystopias on AH, with some plain middling worlds in between them.
 
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Bassoe

Well-known member
But instead of any Deus Ex-like future, we seem to have gotten trapped in the soypunk timeline instead.
Soypunk is a term that should be preserved for posterity.
/tg/ calls it Burgerpunk. Where the ripperdocs change people's genders rather than implanting retractable weaponry and the punks only destroy what the megacorps tell them is OK to destroy (ie, the property of the megacorp's smaller rivals).
it's more optimistic than our current reality?
Less 'optimistic', more 'sure you might not win and things will end up even worse than OTL, but on the other hand, there's still a chance of something other than cyberpunk dystopia or peak resource apocalypse'.
 

Aaron Fox

Well-known member
Less 'optimistic', more 'sure you might not win and things will end up even worse than OTL, but on the other hand, there's still a chance of something other than cyberpunk dystopia or peak resource apocalypse'.
Really, I see that the future is one of constant, unrelenting, warfare. Where trade is nonexistent, madmen with incredible weaponizable tech made outright horrors for their ideologies, and there is literally no privacy.

Oh, and the only way humanity is going to be united is through conquest...
 

Bassoe

Well-known member
I'm vaguely reminded of S. M. Stirling's afterword commentary to his story Shikari in Galvenston published in Harry Turtledove's Worlds That Weren't anthology on the role of Alternate History and Adventure Fiction.
WHY THEN THERE by S. M. Stirling said:
Alternate history has many uses. One of them is to revive literary worlds that time has rendered otherwise inaccessible to us. Writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs or A. A. Merritt could, with some small degree of initial plausibility, litter the remoter sections of the world with lost races and lost cities; their models, writing a generation earlier, had a broader canvas to work with, as exploration wasn’t nearly so complete.

By the 1930s, Burroughs was taking his heroes to other planets and to a putative world within the hollow core of ours, and the last lost races were tribes in the interior of New Guinea. Even Mars and Venus were taken from us a little later, their six-armed green men, canals and dinosaurs replaced with a boring snowball of rust and a sulphuric-acid hell… although alternatives to that are another story, one which I hope to tell someday.

Likewise, the supply of exploits available to a dashing young cavalry officer became sadly limited after 1914. Being machine-gunned at the Somme just isn’t up to the standards of the sort of exploit conveyed by Kipling, Henty, or (in nonfiction) the young Winston Churchill, who participated in one of the last quasi-successful charges by British lancers in 1898, against the Mahdists at Omdurman. Dervish fanatics tend to use plastique these days, rather than swords. Pirates are rather ho-hum Third World extortionists and sneak thieves, rather than characters like Henry Morgan- who was sent home in chains and ended up as governor of Jamaica, after a private audience with Charles II!

In short, by the second decade of the last century the gorgeous, multicolored, infinite-possibilities world opened up with the great voyages of discovery of the sixteenth century was coming to an end. So was the fictional penumbra that accompanied, mirrored, and even inspired it- for the Spanish conquistadors were themselves quite consciously emulating the feats of literary heroes, of the knights of the Chanson du Roland or the fantastic adventures of Amadis of Gaul.

From a literary point of view, this was a terrible misfortune. It’s often forgotten in these degenerate times how close to the world of the pulp adventurers the real world could be in those days.

Allen Quatermain, of H. Rider Haggard’s She and King Solomon’s Mines, was based fairly closely (fantasy elements like immortal princesses aside) on the exploits of Frederick Selous, explorer and frontiersman.

What writer could come up unaided with a character like Richard Francis Burton, the devilish, swashbuckling swordsman-adventurer who fought wild Somalis saber-to-spear, once escaped certain death on an African safari when he ran six miles with a spear through his face, snuck into at least two “forbidden” cities (Mecca and Medina) in native disguise and translated the Thousand and One Nights to boot, after writing a firsthand account of the red-light district of Karachi.

Or Mary Kingsley, who went singlehanded into the jingles of Gabon and did the first field ethnography among the cannibal Fang. In her books, she recommended from personal experience a nice thick set of petticoats, which was exactly what was needed when falling into a pit lined with pointed stakes, and noted that said skirts should contain a convenient pocket for a revolver, “which is rarely needed, but when needed is needed very badly.”

Who could devise adventurers more like unlikely and fantastic than the real life of Harry Brooks in the 1830s, who sailed off to the East Indies in a leaky schooner with a few friends, fought pirates and headhunters, and made himself independent raja of Sarawak? And he was at the tail end of a tradition that began with Cortés and Pizaro setting off on private-enterprise quests to overthrow empires at ten thousand-to-one odds.

That world is still available to us through historical fiction, of course, but that is sadly limiting in some respects; the “end” of the larger story is fixed and we know how it comes out. The Western Front and the Welfare State are waiting down at the end of the road.

Like many another, I imprinted on the literature of faraway places and strange-sounding names at an early age, and never lost the fast for it- or for the real-world history and archaeology to which it led. Fortunately, I also discovered alternate history, a genre within the larger field of speculative fiction, which allows a rigorous yet limitless ringing of changes.

Alternate history can give writer and reader a breath of fresher air, of unlimited possibility, of that world where horizons are infinite and nothing is fixed in stone; where beyond the last blue horizon waits the lost city, the people of marvels, the silver-belled caravan to Shamballah and the vacant throne…

“Shikari in Galvenston” springs from the backbone of my novel The Peshawar lancers. The universe of The Peshawar Lancers stems from an alteration in the history of the nineteenth century: a catastrophic strike by a series of high-velocity heavenly bodies. We know that this sort of thing actually happens, and that a similar (though larger) impact ended the dinosaurian era 65 million years ago.

Being fictional, my impacts could be precisely controlled by authorial fiat, within the boundaries of the physically possible. What they did was o derail “progress” by taking out the most technologically advanced part of the world, and by drastically reducing the world’s overall population.

And so the twentieth and twenty-first centuries see a world where the most advanced regions are only just surpassing the Victorian level of technology and social development, and much remains sparsely inhabited by a wild variety of cultures at a very low level of technology.

In other words, a world larger and better suited to the classic adventure story than ours.

The Peshawar Lancers took place mostly in India, the center of the British Empire and the most advanced state of its day; “Shikari in Gaveston” is set on the Imperial frontiers, in the worlds of a re-barbarized Texas. Both put people in situations that suit the definition of “adventure”: someone else in very bad trouble, very far away.

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Happy Hour in Escape World said:
If there is a game to give away about this strange small anthology without an editor [the anonymous editor, I found out later, was Laura Anne Gilman. 2003], then it’s S M Stirling who gives the game away. “Alternate history has many uses”, he suggests in his afterword to “Shikari in Gaveston”, the long story he contributes to the volume. “One of them” (the only one he is interest in here) “is to revive literary worlds that time has rendered otherwise inaccessible to us”, worlds created by writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs or A Marritt or H Rider Haggard: planetary romance worlds, secondary worlds accessed through portals, lost worlds.

These Worlds to escape into- created at a time when the discovery of the planet was nearing completion, and the hegemony of the imperialistic West over lesser tribes was no longer an unquestionable given- a clearly ancestral to the kind of alternate history story S M Stirling wishes to write, the kind of adventure in which sf-style journeys to lost worlds, or to planets where topless girl warriors fall in love with you are replaced (it is a simple paradigm shift) by Jobar Points which bifurcate reality into histories that are no longer “fixed”, playground where adventure is still possible. (A Jobar Point can be defined as a moment when the outcome of a single act, like John Willkes Booth killing/not killing Lincoln, generates more than one history of the world.) “Alternate history”, Stirling concludes, “can give writer and reader a breath of fresher air, of unlimited possibility…” So we are warned.

Stirling’s is not, of course, alternate history written to illuminate real history, as Kim Stanley Robinson (for one) conceived of it in a novel like The Years of Rice and Salt [see above, p.358]. Worlds that Weren’t (NY: Penguin/Roc, 2002) is a set of game like adventure stories, tales of alternate history written to escape from real history.
Difference is, he's talking about the opportunity to be a swashbuckling gentleman adventurer, something which even at its height, only a small percentage of the total population ever became and I don't envy their survival rate, we're talking about the opportunity to have any potential future beyond a corporatist cyberpunk dystopia or a post-apocalyptic wasteland if the oil and rare earth ores run out without replacements.
 

ATP

Well-known member
Really, I see that the future is one of constant, unrelenting, warfare. Where trade is nonexistent, madmen with incredible weaponizable tech made outright horrors for their ideologies, and there is literally no privacy.

Oh, and the only way humanity is going to be united is through conquest...

Not possible.Witch such technology,after decade or two there would be no cyvilisation left.And instead of wars,we would have primitive survivors taking pigs from each other.
 

Firebat

Well-known member
Nilokeras posits that Kaiserreich's popularity stems from its lore and builds on this premise. However the premise is wrong. The lore did not elevate Kaiserreich - Kaiserreich elevated the lore.

Let's turn back the clock to the very beginning. There is no Kaissereich, not yet. There is the base game however, Hearts of Iron 2. And what a game it is! An unstable, buggy mess; and damning of it all - a boring mess. The only thing its gameplay services well is movement of land divisions in Europe. There are barely any events, politics are castrated even compared to Hearts of Iron 1 (brrrrr...), no economy to speak of, just faceless divisions slogging it out.

But suddenly, a challenger appears, a mod that would surpass and outlive its shameful vanilla foundation! No, not the Kaiserreich, not yet. It is All the Russias mod, made by a bunch of left-wingers (yes, that's Kaiserreich's syndicalist roots). And that thing blows up. Why does it blow up? Because compared to vanilla Hearts of Iron 2, a pile of dog shit would blow up. Anything that would give your nation some personality, some history, some reason behind watching green and brown bars slowly fall to zero under the laws of arcane tabletop math - anything would be welcome.

All the Russias had that in spades. Suddenly, you could choose which faction would prevail and what policy they would pursue. Meaning, choices, missions, bonuses, maluses... An entirely new dimension to HoI2's stale gameplay. You were not playing some abstract Russia - you were playing your Russia, hand picked leaders and policies included. So of course you are invested in your Syndicalists/monarchists/NatPops/[insert name here], they are basically customized to your tastes (with icky bits cut out by your own hand).

Sure, the mod was hastily bolted on a shifty foundation, but it was a quantum leap forward as far as the gameplay and fun factor were concerned. Then All the Russias transformed into Kaiserreich proper (hence why Kaisserreich inherited all sorts of obscure left-wing politics). Then Kaiserreich was moved to Darkest Hour, which was like Hearts of Iron 2.5, and the ball keeps on rolling to this day. There is a major inertia factor to it - people are more likely to keep playing a mod with a lot of content, which means a large modder team, which gives an established mod an advantage. But the chief factor is an extra dimension to the gameplay, one that Paradox seems incapable of properly exploring in their vanilla titles.

Kaiserreich blew up because it offered that additional dimension. The lore is coincidental and rides on the coattails of gameplay's popularity.
 

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