look I get that this opinion is controversial here, but i’ve never gotten a convincing reason as to why it’s wrong. If it’s just your own personal preference that’s fine, But at least state that. Because if we’re talking from simply a pure writing and lore standpoint, new tno is better.
How can someone honestly say that Man in the high castle is better than fatherland? If I can poke a million holes into your alternate history scenario, That’s not a good scenario. If I have to suspend my disbelief to simply ignore the real history, I really can’t take your work seriously
If I were to present this mod to someone like feral historian, and show the old version and the new one then ask to determine which is better. I’d say he pick the new version because it has something more interesting to say other than end of history, fascism always looses, Liberalism always wins
I think a good place to start with this is to paraphrase Josh:
No one will hate you as bitterly as a scorned fan. This is the root of most current problems. Even if we grant you your premise for the sake of argument this entire endeavor is the iDubbbz of HOI4 modding, something that started out with an edgy fanbase that signed up for a wacky retro sci-fi adventure with Tabby, sun guns, Huttig and Mars expeditions and told them to fuck off. Congrats, you now have tens of thousands of embittered fans and over time they've ended up with dozens of angry ex-devs and present team members that hate the other parts of the team and leak everything they make.
Then there's the issue of progress. Reworking an entire mod from the ground up is taking several years with no end in sight. And for what? Most people never asked for what they're selling and changing the entire premise of the mod has so far taken more time than it took to make TFR from scratch and the best we can hope for is a demo for Germany at the end of this year. My point here is that even if you're correct then they'd have been better off making a new mod from scratch. It'd have taken less time and effort compared to replacing nearly everything and as an added bonus they wouldn't have the biggest hatebase in the entire HOI4 community. There is absolutely a place for grounded, realistic wargaming and historical analysis, but why turn a retro sci-fi mod named after a FPS schlock game Panzer liked into it? It makes no sense.
While we're on the subject: it's not an own to point out that something that never was meant to be realistic isn't realistic, you might as well pat yourself on the shoulder for pointing out that Lord of the Rings isn't realistic because magic is fake and then ask yourself how well a remake without fantasy elements would go over with that fanbase. The wacky mod full of unrealistic concepts should've stayed that way, and the people that hate that sort of thing shouldn't have tried to hammer a square peg through a round hole.
That's if we grant you the premise that you're correct which I don't think you are. No, a bunch of pseudo-intellectual neoliberals aren't trying to change the discourse around fascism and open up the eyes of a new generation to this line of thinking and you're barking up the wrong tree if you're hoping to use it to convince people like, the less said about bringing in e-celebs as judges the better. It isn't their intent since they clearly trend towards progressive values but considering the playerbase even if it was the goal then drowning them in dry events while nothing happens just isn't the way to go. If you want to build acceptance for these ideologies you'd be better off using humor and the rule of cool to sell it. In fact, the prevalence of memes about Dirlewanger, Burgundy and the like is likely a key contributing factor for why they've spent years trying to remove these things to little avail. So all this reworking is just an own goal from that perspective.
Another issue I've noticed with you, is that a lot of the positives are just things you made up yourself as you state in your more recent post:
I’ll just ignore the event and keep chugging along because you as the player can simply just not care about what some of the events say
You do this a lot like with your support for the Africa rework. You really ought to stop giving these people that much leeway. They don't agree with you, they never had the intent of giving you the things you want, and if you're going to use headcanon to fix it then you might as well make your own mod that's more appealing to your tastes.
This is not to say that there isn't a place for grounded works or that you're wrong for wanting something like that. I can see where you're coming from there. But chief, a neoliberal's nightmare vision built on the mangled body of a Nazisploitation sci-fi mod isn't going to grant you your wish.
tl;dr: Turning the funny Tabby/Huttig mod into a complete 180 of its original content was a bad idea and the neoliberals making this aren't making the kind of content you seem to want.
Does TNORA still struggle with the same issue of non democratic countries being impossible to win? I was playing as the Aryan Brotherhood and was about to reunify the last part of Russia. As the war was progressing, apparently the Aryans started to lose control over their subhumans, which caused a shit ton of awful debuts that I have no way to control at all. There was a decision to be able to fix it but it seems to be locked until I kill my opponent.
Was this supposed to happen? Am I just retarded?
AB is brutally hard by design. The Aryan control mech runs on a timer throughout the game and you're not intentionally being screwed but if you're too slow it will bite you in the butt, this on top of them being the weakest faction in Russia. Totally doable, it just sounds like you had a bad run at the end. On the right, I'd recommend Samara or Omsk for a more balanced challenge. Amur is also more manageable. On the left, all Soviet successor states are also a lot more reasonable. There's also Komi, which has extremes of both and is definitely doable as all non-democratic unifiers.
