Hearts of Iron 4 mod: Making a start

Hearts of Iron 4 has been one of my favourite games for the past few years now, given my own interest in the history of the Second World War it has always managed to bring me back. The modding scene around the game has also refreshed the game and the Expansions that add new content to the game. One of the updates (Man the guns) added a new focus tree for the united kingdom which added the possibility to take the country down alternate routes than it did in history. One of the routes on the tree would have the trade unions gaining more power and lead to the communists coming to power. But looking at content made around this section of the focus tree talks about the problems it has, mainly how it affects the game's performance.

Image of the full vanilla British Focus tree taken from: https://hoi4.paradoxwikis.com/British_national_focus_tree

I’ve set out to change how the focus tree works using the idea of having a slightly alternate history option for the player to activate my version of the focus tree. The alternate path I decided on was the UK having a Labour government in 1936, as back before 1931 Labour was in power until a number of issues lead to them collapsing in the election of 1931 where the party split over the decision they made over a budget for recovering from the great depression (The Great Slump). My alternate history would have them still lose that election but would have made a budget that they all back and when Clement Attlee comes into the 1935 election in November, he would recover most of the vote and regain power.

Screenshot of the current plans for the focus tree using the Miro board software.

So far I have planned out most of the communist branch. Here I wanted to keep it as close to historical communist movements in Britain at the time (as close as I could, given they never took power). This lead me to look into Pan-national movements as this could fix the performance issues of having fewer AI making checks about where they should have their armies (one of the main issuing slowing down the game by what I could find).

I also thought that given the history around what was known as the “Imperial Federation” with the dominions being culturally closer to the UK before WW1 it could be used as a way to reduce issues with performance as well. It would also meet some of the criticisms made towards the branch in the official game as people complained that in a game about fighting wars and expanding a branch about separating seems a bit off.

Next, I’m going to add another branch for the democratic path with Labour having to balance their reforms and dealing with the response from a number of opposing ideologies and paths for those ideologies to take power. Once I have planned this all out I will start to implement these ideas into a working mod for the game and so I can test these ideas.