u/Aarn_Dellwyyn

I don't want to resurrect an old debate but I guess I just want to chime in with my two cents. I really, really think making Huey Long the only NatPop option for America kind of glosses over just how much more radical, race and Christianity based, and overall just different the at-large far-right movement in the US was compared to him. People like Coughlin and L. K. Smith were at some point tagging along to Long but their brand of nationalism was a lot more outwardly reactionary. Christian Nationalism was the fundamental value that these people held instead of Long's progressive-tinted populist nationalism, and while I can see how their views could change if Long is popular and gets power I do not see how or why these people would abandon their racist and fundamentalist positions and stop trying to push these policies.

I guess one way to tackle this would be to simply add one more path where Long loses control of his movement, leaving the Longists with two AuthDem, one PatAut and two NatPop paths. Long would be the more idiosyncratic, unconventional NatPop and somebody like Gerald L. K. Smith could be a more usual fascist option. Now I get why people wouldn't want to represent essentially Nazis in the mod but I feel like that whitewashes the fact that if a far-right movement took power in the mod's timeline in America, they would be very racially and religiously motivated.

I don't know how many people realise this, but Kaiserreich is old. Probably older than a good chunk of y'all. To put things into perspective, by the time I had heard of Kaiserreich, it was already as old as a middle school student, and this was 12 years ago. If the mod were a person they would be of drinking age in the US and if they decided to pursue higher education (and didn't fail any classes) they would be at least more than halfway done with college.

Being this old, there were many incarnations of the mod, with many things changed over the years. I'm just gonna try and list some of the more interesting things off the top of my head. Fellow oldheads, please correct me where I am wrong and feel free to add anything you remember.

Since a lot of the current focus seems to be on China I guess I'll start there. The basic premise of the Qing being restored is a remnant from the old days, but the map used to look very different. The south used to be a blob ruled by the "Allgemeine(?) Ostasien Gesellschaft", basically a german colony, which could stay stable, collapse into civil war or reform into the Republic of China. This Republic had Song Qingling and a left-wing poet as the SocDem HoS and HoG, Chen Jiongming as the SocCon HoS and unless I am tripping some dude who died before the PoD as the AuthDem HoS. Yunnan Clique was led by Long Yun and also controlles Sichuan. Ma Clique used to control Uyghuristan. The Yiguandao used to be the "Shangqing Tianguo" and they controlled the territory that the CPC controlled in OTL, around Shaanxi. They had a wacky path where you could accept refuges from the AOG and if you did, you'd find a descendant of the Ming dynasty (who turned out to be Zhu Rongji I believe) and could then restore him to the throne as the Tian dynasty. Very late game Zhu would turn 18 and then you could have him and Zhou Enlai, who in this timeline is the model Confucian statesman, leading a NatPop empire. Their general and politician roster was half OTL disciples of tianran and half OTL CPC members, I think Deng Xiaoping was also in there somewhere. Their ideology was also even more syncretic and Taiping-coded. Felt like a fever dream honestly, but I actually kinda miss it weirdly, it was insane in a good way.

I remember Russia pretty vividly. The game used to start off with the President, Kerensky getting shot. Literally everybody hates him so this is not surprising, but this creates a crisis. Either the Duma forms a new government, the Senate makes Dmitry Romanov the President, or one of Denikin or Wrangel perform a coup. The SRs-Mensheviks either create the conditions for the far-left to rise which triggers a civil war, or they can maintain parliamentary democracy. Dmitry Romanov can either restore his cousin to the throne, proclaim himself Tsar, or just remain the president of a conservative republic. Denikin can restore the monarchy, the republic, or remain a dictator. Wrangel is a NatPop who, much like Savinkov, calls himself Vozhd and unlike Savinkov can make himself Tsar. Savinkov himself is but a lowly SR minister. Speaking of Savinkov, when he was first introduced as NatPop leader he had a godawful Nazi-inspired black on red flag with a Slavic pagan symbol where the Swastika would be. The far-left could also take power but they were a little strange, Tukhachevsky was the totalist with a Trotsky-esque world revolution platform, Frunze was a RadSoc and Bukharin was the Syndie. There used to be a Don-Kuban Cossack republic lead by Krasnov in the west and Transamur, a Japanese vassal state lead by Kolchak in the east.

The basic setup in Europe is mostly the same. Belarus used to have a German king instead of being a republic. Poland used to not have a king at all and instead was a regency, and could elect a German, Austrian or Polish king or become a republic. Italy used to have the Pope-lead federation in the north and the syndicalists in the south. I think the Germans used to own Crete at the start? UoB used to start with Philip Snowden but that was changed only relatively recently.

In South America, Argentina, called La Plata and owning Paraguay and Uruguay, was the regional hegemon, lead by Augustin Justo. Chile used to not be syndicalist at start. The setup in Central America was different but I am not sure of the specifics, there was Centroamerica in Guatemala and I think an AuthDem United Provinces in the south. Mexican setup is pretty much the same but I think you could restore the monarchy as the reactionary generals?

As for North America, the basic premise of the US exploding into a three-or-four-way civil war and the basic geographic locations of the factions were the same. You could avoid the civil war with first Charles Curtis and later Floyd Olson but this was added and removed a few times before the devs settled on making the 2ACW a canon event. MacArthur could always do his coup, he could also completely collapse the US into regional warlords in the late game, which is another thing I really miss. Moseley used to be in MacArthur's camp before he was switched over to Long's faction. Speaking of Long, his faction, the "American Union State", lead by the "America-First Party" were a unitary state, were backed by Germany and had Long as the AuthDem, I think Charles Lindbergh as PatAut and fucking Fritz Kuhn of the German-American Bund as the NatPop. Kuhn's position was later given to William Dudley Pelley before Long became the NatPop. The syndicalist faction remains pretty much unchanged if you discount the name and the flag. The pacific revolt used to be completely regionalist and wanted independence rather than national unification most of the time, and were directly backed by Japan.

One final detail in my mind that I can't remember clearly, I think Kaiserreich started not as "Kaiserreich" but as "All the Russias" and focused mostly on, well, Russia. This is just what I think I was told years ago, I could not have experienced it myself because I did not know how to read back then. We'd need a real oldhead to give first-hand accounts on that.

For some countries, I am surprised by how little has changed, and for others how much. I am sure I've missed plenty of interesting things, please do pitch in.