The New Order Last Days Of Europe / Tropes E to M

Main Page | A to D | E to M | N to Z

E-F

• Eagleland: The United States is widely seen as the strongest bastion of freedom in a world full of fascist powers, but more specific opinions tend to have more nuance. Many American politicians agree that problems persist in the United States and will pass legislation to shape their country to their vision, for better or for worse. The only ones who view the Republic and Establishment as a total failure are the Marxists and the Sovereigntist caucuses; the former think that the American system is inherently inequitable and requires a total overhaul to address this, while the latter are vile fascists who see American democracy as anathema and will try to destroy it.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: Goes hand in hand with Earn Your Happy Ending.
  • Before the Cutting Room Floor patch changed many aspects of his game, Reinhard Heydrich's SS had the hardest time of the four German Civil War factions. Not only did it have the smallest army of the four, but it was surrounded on all sides too. In the hands of the AI, Heydrich was designed to lose. If Heydrich somehow managed to win against all the odds, he would still have to deal with Hans Speidel's Wehrmacht forces in Berlin, who decide that they will never let Heydrich rule Germany. Pre-CRF, this would be a one-track, no-stops trip to a Non-Standard Game Over, as three months after his victory, Heydrich would hand Germany's nuclear arsenal over to Himmler in Burgundy and he would launch a nuclear Holocaust on the world. Post-CRF, this outcome is still possible by playing as Burgundy and having Heydrich win the German Civil War, but this is almost impossible to achieve without some cheating or a lot of luck.
  • Albert Speer's Reformed National Socialism route pits him against the Gang of Four and the hardliners under Oberlander, and he is likely to end up as the Puppet King of either group. But it is possible for him to overcome both and emerge as the unquestioned ruler of a Nazi Germany free from its most self-destructive ideological tendencies, possibly leading to a German victory in the Cold War.
  • Dmitry Yazov's apocalyptic quest for vengeance against the hated Germans is usually stomped into the earth long before it gets anywhere. While militarily competent, the Black League's political power gain is low, and their economy is barely scratching. They compete with two other regional states on the regional stage, and at the super-regional, against a unifying state from Central Siberia with a much larger manpower and industrial base. And he has to deal with disgruntled political officers and Pavel Batov's insurgency as well. If Yazov overcomes all of this however, nothing can stop him from enacting his Great Trial and bringing about the end of the world.
  • Sergey Taboritsky of Komi has an uphill battle to unify Russia from the word "go". First, he has to gain power within Komi's right-wing Passionariyy party and then cleverly outmaneuver the centrist and left-wing parties of the Republic. Then he has to overcome much stronger unifiers while contending with massive debuffs that his focus tree imposes on him (for example a -100% population growth debuff, a result of his nationwide purges). If Taboritsky succeeds, the result is the National Socialist theocratic monarchy he builds shattering into pieces upon his death of an apparent brain hemorrhage and leading to the end of Russia as a unified nation, apparently forevermore.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Goes hand in hand with Earn Your Bad Ending.
  • Russia was utterly brutalized after the defeat at the hands of the Nazis and then divided by warlords and wannabe powers for two decades. But Russia can come Back from the Brink and re-emerge as a sensible nation under the right ruler. It could be a sincere Soviet democracy with fair elections under Bukharina, or Sablin. If not them then maybe the enlightened humanist democracy of Tomsk, or the initially fragile but potentially increasingly stable pluralist democracy of Komi. Or how about a benign constitutional monarchy under Rurik II, Mikhail I, or Vladimir III? Maybe it's Sverdlovsk, one of the last remnants of the Red Army, which unites the country and then gently hands it to the people. Maybe the anarchists of the Black Army can turn Russia into a free territory where everyone has the right to live in dignity as they please. Almost all of these remnant states face an uphill battle largely against those who would sacrifice their core ideals for the sake of keeping the nation ticking along in their own mundane sense of the term. But one can take comfort in the fact that most of the nastier warlords face similarly daunting opposition (see Earn Your Bad Ending), and whatever the case, should any of these win, then Russia will stand out as a bastion of moral governance in a Nazi-dominated world gone mad, and her people will have a reason to be optimistic again for the first time in many years.
  • In general, this can be the case for the TNO universe if the player chooses the best possible path(s) for their nation. This means that Germany will become a relatively paternalistic but fair democracy under the reformist Gang of Four led by Helmut Schmidt that erases any traces of the old regime from Europe, China becomes a rising superpower that deals a major blow to Japan's Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the United States stays democratic, the United Kingdom will reemerge and the world will avoid nuclear war under the careful supervision of the Organization of Free Nations.
  • Though if the worst does come to worst, the post-nuclear holocaust events suggest that while billions died and human civilization was wiped out, the war did not lead to human extinction. Some people survived, and after millennia of sorrowful reflection and tireless work to rebuild a broken world, the Distant Epilogue shows their descendants taking their steps back onto the Moon as an advanced and peaceful civilization. The confused astronauts remove the now bleached white Nazi flag from the ancient landing site and plant their own in its place, the symbolic final surrender of a monstrous ideology forgotten forevermore.
• Easy Logistics: Averted in the Russian Anarchy. The pre-regional focus trees of the warlords repeatedly emphasize that reunification is impossible without logistics to command an organized military and multiple months are spent trying to repair the country's infrastructure.
• Egopolis: When the Soviet Union still existed, Donetsk was named "Bukharino" and Novokuznetsk was named "Bukharinsk" after the General Secretary himself.
• Empty Quiver: The German Civil War affords Himmler the chance to raid German nuclear stockpiles, assisted by Heydrich. Once Heydrich' betrayal happens if he wins the Civil War, the situation happens to both Burgundy and the Reich; upstart, renegade SS divisions take control of various nuke silos, and both entities must seek to influence or conquer them over to their side to claim enough nuclear superiority.
• Enemy Mine:
  • If Heydrich is on his way to winning the German Civil War, there's a chance for this to be triggered between Speer, Bormann, and Göring in the form of a temporary coalition as they and the entire world would prefer any other outcome than his and Himmler's victory.
  • If Heydrich wins the German Civil War, he himself is essentially required to do while while building a coalition against Himmler in the sequent collapse and war against Burgundy. While some warlord are already ideologically with Heydrich’s Pragmatist SS faction, for Heydrich to successfully work with the majority of them, it require at least some level of compromise of SS ideals. Particularly blatant examples of this are working with a warlord state of former slaves (and lead by an ethnically Jewish former underground partisan), Poland, Ulrike Meinhof, Germany’s liberal democratic reformist faction, and Ferdinand Schörner
  • If Germany threatens the Russian warlords, they can set aside their disagreements and temporarily unite their military forces to resist the Nazi forces.
  • Speer's less internationalist, more pragmatic foreign policy route has him seek a downplayed version of this — he will seek détente with the USA, and by extension the OFN, so as to allow both sides to focus on their common enemy, Japan.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Nearly everybody, fair or foul, recognizes that Himmler is dangerously insane and will only work with him out of desperate necessity. Even within Nazi Germany itself, he and his state of Burgundy are considered rogue elements protected only by Hitler's sympathies, and his candidate for succession — Reinhard Heydrich— has no genuine public support. This goes so far that if Heydrich is made successor, the Reichstag will break with Hitler's orders and only confirm his position by the space of a few votes instead of the expected unanimous agreement that all other candidates receive.
    • Heydrich himself will eventually turn on Himmler due to horror at what he is planning, and so can most of the Nazi warlords that emerge in the ensuing chaos, starting off for the most part unaware of why the giants of the SS are turning on one another.
  • The segregationists in America may be corrupt, white supremacists, but even they denounce Yockey as an extremist and decry his election, if it occurs.
  • As reprehensible as Omsk's thermonuclear genocidal maniacs, the Holy Russian Empire's insane necrocrats, Amur's fascists, Samara's neofeudalist bandit lords, and the rest of Russia's least savory potential unifiers are, everyone in Russia absolutely despises the Aryan Brotherhood for completely and proudly shunning Russian culture in favor of slavishly trying to appeal to the Germans by adopting a horrid pastiche of their culture and imposing traditionally Russophobic Nazism on their own people.
• Evil Versus Evil:
  • Germany is engaged in a Cold War not only with the US, but also with its former ally, Imperial Japan, who has carved out an empire in Asia. In the early game, the Triumvirate also has its hand in geopolitics, where its members are a fascist regime (Italy), a dual dictatorship (Iberian Union), and a one-party ruled state (Turkey).
  • In the German Civil War, even the least bad side (Speer's forces) are still Nazis, if less brutal ones than the other sides.
  • If Heydrich wins, he eventually turns on Himmler after realizing his true goals. His campaign will revolve around seeking to influence the rest of the SS to turn on Himmler.
  • Dirlewanger, one of the vilest Nazis both in the OTL and in TNO and the ruthless Bandit King of Western Russia, will likely go to war with Trofim Lysenko, a Lamarckian Soviet scientist who had gone batshit insane and abducts entire villages of civilians for cruel human experimentation.
  • The worst case scenarios for Russian reunification may result in the most evil faction unifying each region, reulting in a fight between the Purified Aryan Brotherhood (or Western Russian Regency — AKA Taboritsky's Komi) in Western Russia, Dirlewanger's Realm in Ural, the West Siberian Provisional Authority (Omsk) in Western Siberia, Alexander Pokryshkin's Central Siberian Federation in Central Siberia, and All-Russian Government of the Far East (Amur) in the Far East.
  • Neither Italy or Turkey are saints, with the former dominated by the world's first fascist movement and the latter ruled by a single party that has ruthlessly assimilated its minorities and extinguished its political opposition. As such, the Second Italo-Turkish War can more or less be summarized as two land-grabbing regimes fighting over who gets to own which territory.
• Failure Is the Only Option:
  • Himmler's dream of an Aryan utopia by nuclear fire is doomed to fail. Thanks to their isolation, Burgundy is extremely unlikely to influence global events to drive it to nuclear war and more likely to collapse due to domestic instability. Even if thermonuclear war does occur, the survivors will merely rebuild civilization, with the surviving Germans in Burgundy joining them, thinking that they are Aryans.
  • There is no way for any Ukraine faction to survive after the Ukrainian Civil War, they will either get overrun in the subsequent Nazi invasion or last out long enough and actually make gains, only for the Nazis to press the big red button.
• Fallout Shelter Fail: One of the post-apocalyptic events features a fallout shelter in which everything that could have wrong has gone wrong: the vault doors didn't seal shut, the tunnel had to be dynamited to keep out the radiation, half the food hadn't been delivered, the doctors never showed up, and structural failures destroyed much of the shelter. Worse still, the food spoiled very quickly and the water was contaminated, accelerating the inevitable deaths. By the start of this little story, there's only one survivor left out of the entire vault population, waiting to die as the lights go out and the roof caves in.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: Germany's existence writ large since WWII has been one of suffering the consequences of victory, culminating in the crisis at the start of the game. Speer's Reformed National Socialism path is a twist on it in that it is relatively efficient compared to what the various Ultranationalist, Spartanist, and other National Socialist candidates have to offer (IE, stagnation and/or repression). The entire point of Speer's arch is arguably that Nazism is so inefficient that moving away from it is the only way to truly save the Reich from destruction. Speer's reforms are successful not because of the inherent superiority of Speer's moderate Nazism, but rather because the mere act of leaving the Nazi system behind is an instant improvement for the country's politics and economy.
• Fate Worse than Death: To live in Ordensstaat Burgundy is to live under the most horrific totalitarian regime imaginable. Only the very barest necessities for life are granted, and the entire population including the "Aryans" are controlled by a system of fear and brutality. If you are a French and Belgian native then you face a life under a whip, literally working until you drop dead from exhaustion in appalling conditions.
• Fictional United Nations: Nothing like the United Nations exists when the game begins^note Unless the League of Nations still technically exists, but even then it would really only matter for its archives and residual assets at this point, but Speer, in two of his three paths, will spearhead the creation of the Koalition der Nationen (KdN), a clear analogue to the UN. However, the KdN in Speer's Fascist path is actually an organization intended to expand Fascist influences across the world through diplomatic pressure, rather than an actual international diplomatic organization. The KdN in the Gang of Four path is closer to the real United Nations.
• Final Solution:
  • Germany's efforts to exterminate Jews has been considered completed, with the Jewish population in Europe being at most in the thousands. Generalplan Ost, their ethnic cleansing plan against Slavs to colonize Eastern Europe, is still ongoing. By 1962, the Jewish population in Europe is in the triple digits.
  • Himmler seeks to relaunch it by exterminating all other races through nuclear war.
  • The Aryan Brotherhood, as well as a few of the other extreme right Russian warlords, either are already enacting one or would like to, given the chance.
  • The Great Trial, Omsk's great plan, is a systematic genocide of all German people to the last man and erasure of the very German identity.
  • During the German Civil War between Heydrich and Himmler, Adolf Eichmann is restarting it in his fied.
• Friendly Enemy: Men and Sablin's views are fundamentally incompatible (Men is an Orthodox preacher who wants to establish a Christian theocracy, Sablin is a Marxist-Leninist who considers religion to be the opium of the people), but they recognize in each other a fellow idealist who wants to build a free, just, and kind society in a desolate hellscape. If one is defeated by the other, he may even be recruited for the cause.
• Foreign Ruling Class: The Reichkommisariats and Burgundy are ruled by Germans while the native populations are Slavic, French and Belgian respectively.
• The Fundamentalist:
  • Fundamentalism is a sub-ideology of Ultranationalism in TNO. Adherents of Fundamentalism include the National Redemption Front in the Iberian Wars, who is a group of violent fundamentalist Catholics, and Los Pájaros in New Granada under León María Lozano.
• Future Imperfect:
  • One of the post-apocalyptic events tells a story about descendants of the German soldiers in Central Africa who settle around the northern coast of Africa and whose leader names himself after the legendary warrior and God-King Desert Fox, who once conquered the deserts.
  • In another event, some native tribe fills abandoned New York City and discovers the untouched Empire State Building, which they believe to be the centre of some ancient Empire, and make the building the capital of their own state, naming their new Empire appropriately the Empire State.
  • Another post-apocalypse event sees the descendants of Burgundy emerge to rebuild Aryan society. So far have they gone down the path of believing that only Aryans should survive the nuclear apocalypse that they believe that only Aryans can survive the nuclear apocalypse. They thus believe that everyone who survived the nuclear war is Aryan by default, thus negating Burgundy's original racial ideology. This decidedly welcome ideological sacrilege is compounded by the continuation of the belief that Aryans must always render all aid possible to other Aryans...
  • Yet another event◊ details what future anthropologists thought caused the end, known to them as the Post Antediluvian Collapse. Some think that a drastic drop in birth rate caused civilizational collapse on a world wide scale. Others think a radiological event caused the Collapse. Other theories range from a plague, to a collapse of oxygen levels, to an alteration in solar activity, to an asteroid impact. Others think that the pre-collapse world is just a myth.

G-H

• Gaia's Lament: Heavy industrial development and mining works under Reichskommissar Josias made Kaukasia one of the most polluted nations in the world, complete with a constant smog filling the country and neighbors, making life in Kaukasia even more unbearable for the oppressed native population. As Burgundy advances in the plotline, it soon becomes a similar factory of evil.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Some countries have custom news headers for when they read international events, including Amur◊, Brazil◊, Burgundy◊, Canada◊, Chile◊, China◊, Germany◊, a democratic Germany◊, Guangdong◊, Ireland◊, Japan◊, Ponylon◊, communist Russian states◊, Red Army states◊, Tsarist Russian states◊, Uruguay◊, the United Kingdom◊, the United States◊, and Yunnan◊.
  • The populations in Antarctica vary by season. In summer, the bases can be home to tens of thousands. In winter, it drops to just the skeleton crew. Thus, supply consumption will drop during the latter season, reflecting the reduced number of people in the territory.
• Genre Shift:
  • Compared to the base game and other popular mods, TNO is more narrative focused (with the narratives of many countries having a political/conspiracy thriller feel), especially since the devs have made it clear that war in a Cold War setting between big powers will result in nuclear destruction and game overs. This is quite well reflected in the focus trees of nations, which while in the main game and other mods are used to develop a nation to prep it for warfare, are instead used to progress a central story.
  • The game even experiments with horror, both in terms of its setting, creepypasta-esqeue Apocalyptic Log events, and the nuclear war supervent. Much like Nineteen Eighty-Four, the horror comes not from anything supernatural, but plain old twisted human ideals. Notable examples are the Russian Warlord states Magnitogorsk which has its events written like scientific documents like the SCP Foundation and Taboritsky's Komi which is written like a Psychological Horror story due to its leader being utterly depraved and insane.
    • And after the apocalypse, the game genre shifts into post-apocalyptic story texts, which verge on fantasy at times. At least until humanity recovers to a more modern state.
  • The game, as a whole, has far more in common with Political Strategy Games like Crisis in the Kremlin than Paradox Grand Strategy Games. The actual military strategizing part of HOI4 is significantly downplayed in TNO (all of the manual military actions like justifying war goals are disabled in TNO), and becomes secondary to the political simulation (for example, sending volunteers as USA, a normal mechanic in base game HOI4 with no political impact, is tied to US-specific mechanics that simulate anti-war sentiments in TNO). Most countries have their own specifically engineered political simulation mechanics designed to reflect the differing situations in each country, usually involving managing the relative influences of political factions within the country in order to guide the country towards a desired ending.^{Examples include:}Parties and their wings in USA, Yokusankai factions in Japan, reformists vs conservatives and the Zollverein in Speer's Germany, the Kartenhaus in Bormann's Germany, the militarist UI in Goering's Germany, Tomsk's Duma, Komi's party control, Zhukov's political leanings in his WRRF, the Iberian Council's authoritarian/democratic leanings and Ireland's Dáil Even countries that don't have these specific mechanics often also have divergent event paths that loosely simulate politics.
  • To reflect the setting's shift from a World War-simulator to a Cold War-simulator, the economic mechanics have been greatly overhauled from the vanilla game. Now, the player must balance their GDP growth, inflation, and debt, using a variety of policies, sliders, and buttons to manage government spending. Unlike in HOI4, it is important to keep spending so that the economy grows, but it also must be carefully managed so that the country isn't overwhelmed by an extreme deficit that outpaces their growth. Improper management incurs unique, crippling debuffs through fiscal crises, which can include negative real growth, critical inflation, extremely high deficit, critical debt, or bloated reserves.
• Ghostapo: Followers of Esoteric Nazism have a special interest in the occult and mystic practices. One of them, Reichskommissar Josias of Kaukasia, can even launch expeditions in search of magical and powerful artifacts of the ancient past.
• Global Currency: As the developers have admitted, the economic mechanics of the mod use a single form of currency because coding in different exchange rates would be too complex to add.
• Going Home Again: Taking his overdue seven-day break from work, Lam goes back to the small seaside fishing village to reconnect with his family that he hasn't heard from in over a year.
• Good Versus Good:
  • The Azad Hind Government and the Republic of India remain the most bitter rivals even if they both are ruled by democratic and generally well-intentioned factions.
  • All of Salons in Tomsk are well-intentioned and merely conflict with each other because they have different ideas on how Russia can be saved. The worst of the bunch are the Bastillards, but they are more anti-heroic than genuinely malevolent. Downplayed, in that as bad as things can get in Tomsk politics, none of the Salons have anti-democratic paths, refuse to accept the results of elections they don't like, or can cause the situation within the Republic to degrade into civil war.
• Goodbye, Cruel World!: One of the final events in the Japan investigation chain is presented in a form of the final letter of a Yasuda bank worker to his wife before he hangs himself.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language:
  • Many non-English speaking states, especially former Axis states, display their country name on the map in their native language. An obvious example is the Großgermanisches Reich, the default display name for Germany as the Greater German Reich.
  • Non-English political parties almost always use Latin transliterations of their original language names in the political menus. The West Russian Revolutionary Front for example has the ruling party of ZRF - Zapadnorusskiy Revolyutsionny Front.
• Great Offscreen War:
  • Aside from alternate WWII, there was a West Russian War in the 50s between Germany and the warlord state of the West Russian Revolutionary Front (supported by the US and Japan to prevent German expansion outside of Europe) which expanded into territories of RK Moskowien and intended to reclaim the entirety of Russia. Germany emerged victorious in the war and pushed the West Russians beyond, but the price for victory was very high for the Reich.
  • Eager to claim even more territory, Germany invaded Portugal's African colonies during the Südwestafrikan War in the late 1940's. With it, Portugal lost control of Mozambique and Angola, which motivated its merger with Spain in the Iberian Union.
  • When Moumié and the Pan-Africanists took over Cameroon, they organized a continental army to invade RK Zentralafrika, routing the garrisons there and facing attacks by the Luftwaffe. The conflict concluded when Japan mediated a resolution between the two sides, giving the Congo basin to the Iberian Union.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Infamously, the West African War, no matter how it shakes out. The French exiles of Free France want to return to their homeland and restore the republic and are backed by the OFN, but they are an apartheid state squatting on land they stole from native Africans and can potentially embrace colonialist antics and try to force the rest of the region into a French Military Alliance under their control, and the OFN will still back them because it suits their interests in the region. Cameroon's Pan-African Liberation Front genuinely wants to bring socialism and democracy to the rest of Africa and to drive out foreign colonizers, but not only are they backed by the shady and extremely colonialist Co-Prosperity Sphere, their particular brand of pan-Africanism involves turning places they liberate into a Hegemonic Empire firmly within their sphere of influence, and they will invade and conquer even neutral and socialist nations that value their independence more than a sense of solidarity with the pan-African movement. Even the West African Alliance (which Free France can potentially join instead of founding the FMA, but can also end up fighting both the FMA and PALF), generally the least-objectionable faction, is willing to tolerate dictatorships within their ranks, so long as the member states each maintain local autonomy. And no matter who wins, the result is tragedy, whether it means the Free French are forced into their last holding on the Kerguelen Islands to starve and waste away with no possible hope of ever restoring the Republic, Cameroon shattering into civil war as local minorities and ambitious and unscrupulous generals and politicians make power plays and with it any hope of their pan-African vision ever being realized, or, if the West African Alliance wins in the three-way war scenario, both.
• The Gulag:
  • Besides extermination camps, Germany also has a system of not-as-lethal slave camps, where its prisoners are slowly worked to death.
  • On the reverse, several Soviet gulags liberated themselves after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the former guards and prisoners united to form the Ural League, with many of their former prisons being converted into formidable military fortifications.
• Historical Domain Character: Virtually everyone of note in the mod from heavy hitters such as Heinrich Himmler and Richard Nixon to relatively unknown and obscure figures (i.e. most of the Russian warlords/unifiers).
• Historical In-Joke: One post-apocalyptic event centers around a community on the island of Sukhoy Nos, and pretty much just repeats how much of a backwater the place is and what a complete waste it would be to launch even a single nuke at it. Sukhoy Nos in real life was a Soviet nuclear testing site, and was where the Tsar Bomba was detonated.
• Historical Villain Upgrade:
  • A curious case with adherents of various right-wing ideologies (especially of the radical kind) in post-Soviet territories. The developers decided to tone down applying this trope to commemorated Heroes of the Soviet Union with largely unknown personalities. As such, the Aryan Brotherhood (neo-Nazi faction), while lead by two real Russian neo-Nazi ideologues, has its generals consist entirely of former Heroes stripped of their rank for committing various crimes, ranging from hooliganism to rape and murder (while despicable acts, still not on the same level as personally perpetrating wide scale genocide). Likewise, the Komi right: Lev Gumilyov (from an influential historian and philosopher [who was also an anti-Semite, womanizer, and generally egotist], to the leader of an extremely violent stratified dictatorship); Igor Shafarevich (from mathematician and hardline critic of the Soviet order whose critique did spill over into anti-Semitism sometimes but also attacked anti-Jewish Soviet policies, to despotic dictator) and Sergey Taboritsky (from monarchist White emigre Nazi collaborator, to schizophrenic genocidal despot who, if he manages to seize power, will implement a system modeled after RK Kaukausien but outmatching it in cruelty).
  • Similarly, the leaders of the All-Russian Black League in Omsk were historically largely brutal KGB Generals while Dmitry Yazov was a prominent hardline politician and leader of the August Coup. However, they certainly did not advocate destroying Germany or killing every German in the world, which they do in this world.
• History Repeats: The Russian Anarchy is considered the Second Time of Troubles, in reference to the past period of violence, succession crises, and famine that followed the death of Fyodor I and the end of the Rurik dynasty.
  History does not repeat itself... but it sure rhymes.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: When cornered by fighters from the Ural League in his laboratory, Trofim Lysenko can try and release his human experiments, claiming they are now super soldiers and will protect him to the last. They rip him to shreds instead.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The French State always gets attacked by Burgundy in the chaos of the German Civil War. Given the absolute military superiority of Burgundy in terms of numbers, training and organization over the French State, it's functionally impossible for the French to win without extremely careful player planning.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: In the backstory (or the old backstory at least), a nuclear bomb was dropped on Hawaii on the 4th of July, forcing the United States to surrender and ushering in an Axis victory.
• Hostile Terraforming: In Reichskommissariat Zentralafrika, the Nazis have constructed a huge lake in the Congo Basin, thanks to some extensive damming of the Congo River.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: German bomber pilots utilize defenseless civilian centers in West Africa and the remains of Russia as target practice.

I-K

• I Will Fight Some More Forever: Huang Kecheng, a former Chinese Communist soldier and follower of Mao Zedong, refused to believe that the Chairman was killed during the battle of Chongqing and continued to resist the Japanese rule for decades, surviving due to banditry and raids in villages in Eastern Shandong. Eventually, he is captured by the Kempeitai and executed.
• Idealist vs. Pragmatist: Valery Sablin, who rules Buryatia, can choose between a more idealistic direction for his future reunified USSR and a more repressive direction, encouraged by Otto Braun, which gives more results.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The difficulty levels have been renamed (from easiest to hardest) Defcon 5, Defcon 4, Defcon 3, Defcon 2, and Defcon 1.
• Industrialized Evil: TNO generally pulls no punches describing the brutal effects of fascism, but Burgundy takes it up to eleven. One of its core mechanics forces the player to manage "skilled workers", balancing them with the SS presence in different provinces, burning them on projects and bonuses, and even building concentration camps as a gameplay mechanic in the "Industriebezirk Rodomo" project.
• Inevitable Mutual Betrayal:
  • The anti-Heydrich coalition that may form during the German Civil War can involve the cooperation of all other factions, but this path cannot lead to a true peace between the factions and no path can. There may only be one victor.
  • As soon as their common enemies are defeated, the Dirlewanger Brigade and Magnitogorsk immediately turn on each other.
  • The anti-Imperial alliance in the Iranian Civil War will always collapse as soon as the Imperial State is defeated or some time passes without achieving their final victory.
• In Medias Res:
  • Richard Nixon has been a President for a year by the mod start date and has already made impactful decisions that can't be reverted in the game. It is represented by pre-starting focus trees that show what actions he took during his tenures and possible alternatives he could take but aren't available to the player, including playing safe towards the NPP, enforcing either racial integration or segregation instead of toeing the middle line and embarking on the "California Plan", a blitz attack to reclaim the Japanese-controlled ports.
  • The Hawaiian Missile Crisis, the analogue of the Cuban Missile Crisis and one of the hottest points of the Cold War, has reached its peak before the start and comes to an end and peaceful resolution by 1962.
  • In Brazil, Lott has completed part of his focus tree to show some of the actions he's completed before 1962, such as opening the city of Brasília and ending worker strikes in the coffee industry.
• In Name Only: Sverdlovsk and Magnitogorsk still consider their states successors to the USSR and use Soviet symbols, but their governments are labelled paternalist and despotist respectively since they don't actually employ socialist policies and are straight up juntas.
• Insane Troll Logic: Germany was at its best during the war. So clearly the way to restore Germany to greatness is to declare war on everybody. This is the militarists' plan anyway.
• Irony:
  • The All-Russian Black League of Omsk want to unleash total war on the world for what they see as a terrible and humiliating injustice done against their beloved country in the aftermath of a defeat in a great international war. Their leader, Dmitry Yazov, was once nothing more than an unremarkable soldier on the losing side, now finding himself through shrewd political machination, the leader of a powerful right-wing party plotting genocide against a hated people who they see as responsible for all their countries' woes and thus all deserving of death. Omsk's soldiers wear scary black uniforms, engage in wanton war crimes, and fight with the utmost fanaticism against their enemies. All of this makes the All-Russian Black League almost indistinguishable from the Nazi Germany they so vehemently oppose.
  • If Russia is reformed by the Siberian Black Army staying true to anarchism, you have one of the most wholesome unifiers bearing a black flag with a skull and crossbones on it. Conversely the Holy Russian Empire, who have a bright yellow and white flag with Jesus on it, results in one of the most horrific and immoral nations in the entire game.
• Is This Thing Still On?:
  • A member of the Japanese House of Peers boasts about purchasing expensive cars, escort services, and fine wines with Yokusankai funds in the House chamber without realizing his microphone is still on, ending his political career and triggering student protests against corruption in the Japanese government.
  • If Bormann visits the White House when Curtis LeMay is President, the two of them will engage in a screaming match that turns the air blue with their profanities - while the cameras are still rolling.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: Should nuclear war break out, you get to watch every country in the world disintegrate into anarchy as a result of the war. After that, if you wait around long enough, you then can get treated to events that happen after the end.
• Japan Takes Over the World: Not without hardships and sacrifices, Japan can come up as the strongest (if not the only) superpower in the world and kick out all their rivals from the world stage.
• Karma Houdini: This is the strongest dark element of Speer winning and successfully reforming the Reich to the fullest extent possible. Although this path is the least bad option of Hitler's successors, it does mean that many Nazis who contributed to the horrors committed before Speer took charge will never face justice for their crimes, as Speer needs to compromise with and pardon many of them in order for his reforms to work, and Germany does not face up to the horrible crimes done in its name. Speer may try persecuting some Nazis but it won't end well for stability. Given that Speer's true intentions are definitely not good and he prides himself on upholding Hitler's legacy, it's a given that he'd never want the sheer extent of Nazi crimes to be revealed.
• Keeper of Forbidden Knowledge: When Arizonian priests in a post-apocalyptic event discover a pre-war nuclear missile site, they decide to ensure that no one else would ever enter and learn the true purpose of the foul place.
• King on His Deathbed: A recurring trend in the game is to feature aging leaders who are nearly on death's door at the start of the game, opening branching paths for the player to choose their successor.
  • Hitler plays this role at the start of the game, with the men around him plotting to take his place.
  • A number of Russian warlords, such as Omsk, Samara, Tomsk and the WRRF, begin with leaders at death's door at the start of the game whose passing opens up their states' real paths.
• Klingon Promotion: Heydrich paved his way to the heights of the SS and Hitler's favor through a mountain of corpses. The brutality and unscrupulousness of Heydrich towards his competitors made him very admirable in the eyes of Hitler, a firm Social Darwinist and encourager of the most fierce factionalism in the Reich.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: One of the main purposes of the Republican-Democratic coalition in foreign policy is keeping America from direct military conflicts with Germany and Japan and to avoid escalation of the Cold War into "hot" as long as it ever possible. Since, according to CIA reports, Germany and Japan are slowly deteriorating and will likely collapse by themselves in 70s and 80s respectively, the R-D governing elite hopes to peacefully reclaim the captured ports and force back all the rival superpowers afterwards. However, the hawkish elements of the National Progressive Pact have a different opinion on this matter...

L-M

• Les Collaborateurs: Most of Europe is dominated by these, most noticeably the UK, where the collaborationist People's Party is the only party allowed to govern and the nation maintains a German military garrison, which itself is hardly holding on for survival.
• Lighter and Softer:
  • Compared to every other region in the remains of Russia, Central Siberia is this trope. The Far East is poorly industrialized and stuck in a quagmire between right-to-far-right White remnants and despotic Soviet remnants, while Western Russia is besieged by the Luftwaffe bombings and is a messy political free-for-all. In sharp contrast, Central Siberia emerged relatively unscathed from the Soviet Union's collapse, and it sits on top of Bukharin's abandoned Siberian Plan, which gives them an opportunity to kickstart re-industrialization and reach parity with Western Russia. The region also lacks outright villains; the worst paths in Central Siberia are extremely cynical but never dystopian, and it also possesses some of the most genuinely-benevolent unifiers. Overall, Central Siberia is easily the most forgiving and light-hearted region in all of Russia in terms of gameplay and story. Unfortunately, the absence of real villains ensures that any attempts to reunify Central Siberia will, quite dishearteningly, end in Good Versus Good wars.
  • The game with every update. There was pre-release hype of a global horror story where Burgundy is the world's global Nazi conspiracy that could destroy the world, Japan possibly becoming a hellish nightmare empire that could rival Burgundy, and Taboritsky's demise spirals into the total death of the Russian nation into an ultranationalist-crazed anarchy with no end in sight. Now, Burgundy can become a delusional North Korea expy in Europe which has no influence beyond Europe, Japan merely becomes just a bit harsher in failstate moments, and the epilogue to After Midnight ends on a bright note that Russia will eventually recover from Taboritsky's madness. Unlike most examples of this trope, these tonal shifts weren't usually made to be more "family-friendly", but rather artistic decisions to better represent history (i.e. the SS being a notoriously incompetent organization and unlikely to influence global events).
• A Lighter Shade of Black: While the Co-Prosperity Sphere is controlled by an Imperialist Japan, Japan's rule is overall less brutal than Nazi Germany's rule over Europe (though this is in part due to Japan's own struggles with control). Nations under the Co-Prosperity Sphere generally have fewer overtly horrific paths to go down, and more opportunities for peaceful reforms.
• Luxury Prison Suite: Sablin's forced labor camps. The sentences are short (a former NKVD executioner was sentenced for a mere year), the labor is not backbreaking, and the prisoners are treated amicably.
• Make the Bear Angry Again: A variation. After being teared apart by anarchy following the German defeat for over 20 years, Russia can emerge as a strong and united power once again and become vindictive against Germany and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
• MegaCorp:
  • Germany's industry is dominated by for megacorporations: IG Farben, Daimler-Benz, Reichswerke, and Siemens. They own millions of slave laborers, control assets across the Einheitspakt, and have a lot of influence in the politics of Speer and Bormann's Germany.
  • The Japanese economy is dominated by zaibatsu conglomerates, most prominently the Yasuda Zaibatsu.
  • The politics of Guangdong isn't (just) controlled by the the Four Companies in that they strongarm government officials into compliance through bribery. This control is open and official, with the companies acting like political parties and putting up candidates for the colony's leadership from among their executives. The members of the legislature aren't even zaibatsu-controlled representatives nominally operating in their capacity as members of the Yokusankai or what have you: they are all direct, actual, literal representatives of the zaibatsu themselves, making Guangdong One Nation Under Copyright.
  • The politics of Novosibirsk, while nominally democratic, is deeply corrupt, and is heavily influenced by three local megacorporations: the military-industrial Feniks, the banking and farming Sibir, and the science & tech company Titan.
  • ENI of Italy, thanks to Italy's massive influence in the Middle East, is easily the largest oil company in the world. Its collapse outright causes the Oil Crisis.
• Mêlée à Trois: The Iranian Civil War is a Proxy War where all three superpowers are involved.
• Meta Twist: TNO is famous for a dispropriate number of dystopic, malevolent and outright genocidal regimes, especially in Russia, where a cult ran by Germanophilic Nazis, an Ultranationalist xenophobic holdout and insane monarcho-Nazi regency for a long-dead Tsarevich don't seem to be out of ordinary. When Father Men was first teased as an ominous threat to the Russian unifiers in the Far East, it seemed natural to expect that he would follow the pattern, but instead, he was revealed as a very idealistic and compassionate figure who seeks to abolish the unjust exploitation in the warlord Russia and bring the kingdom of God on Earth through equality and mutual aid.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Like most RTS's, expect thousands if not millions of lives to be snuffed out in the meat grinder of war and your state's own cruelty, but they are nothing but numbers and statuses on your screen. The mod's real emotional punch are the events that pop up detailing individual's lives, hopes, and tragedies. The phrase is outright said word for word in Burgundy's first event as a mother is told her newborn has been euthanized for being subhuman (read: having "mongoloid" traits) as she's recovering in the maternity ward.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: The storyline of Japan starts with an investigation of a seemingly minor case of murder near the docks which ends in a grand reveal of high levels of corruption between the government, military and large bussiness families, leading to the collapse of the government and economic crisis.
• Mini-Game: There are many decision-based minigames in TNO, used to metaphorically represent political struggles.
• Mirroring Factions: The All-Russian Black League of Omsk is a political party that emerged from the ashes of a defeat in a global conflict. Their leader Dmitry Yazov is a terrifyingly insane dictator who was once just a rather unremarkable soldier on the losing side, and while the party leadership mimics authoritarian-socialist rhetoric and nationalist iconography to draw on popular support, it's ultimately little more than a supremacist right-wing death cult plotting to unleash total war on the world to avenge what they see as a humiliating historic injustice; nationalist arrogance and wounded pride gone mad. Omsk's soldiers dress in scary black uniforms, engage in wanton war crimes, and fight fanatically against their enemies. All of this ultimately makes the All-Russian Black League almost indistinguishable in practice to the Nazi regime.
• Monumental Damage: Heydrich destroys the Volkshalle during his war with Speidel.
• Monochrome to Color: Most of the event pictures in the first years of the game are black and white, but as the time goes on, more and more pictures become colorized. By the end of the 70s, almost all event pictures are colorized.
• Morality Kitchen Sink: Russia is made up of warlord states that run the whole spectrum of morality. There are genuine idealists like Tomsk, Sablin's Buryatia and Father Men, who try to follow their moral values even in a Crapsack World that is the Russian Anarchy. Then, there are otherwise heroic countries that are undermined by serious flaws like democratic Komi, or nations that are Good Is Not Soft types that are willing to Shoot the Dog when necessary, like Zhukov's WRRF and Batov's Sverdlovsk. There are neutral countries whose morality depends upon the player's actions such as Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk. There are villainous countries who nevertheless have redeeming qualities and are able to change for the better like Fascist Magadan, Samara, Irkutsk and Tyumen, and others with sympathetic backgrounds such as Omsk or Tukhachevsky's WRRF. At the very bottom are the warlords with little to no redeeming qualities whose ascension will spell suffering for Russia, such as Amur, Taboritsky's Holy Russian Empire, or the Aryan Brotherhood.
• Mundane Made Awesome: In Hearts of Iron IV, focus trees are generally used for managing the development of player's nation. In The New Order, focus trees can be used to represent trivial yet still very impactful processes, like organization of state-level parties.
• Murder by Mistake: After the Assassination Attempt on Hitler, several assassination plots against government officials prematurely fire, since their planners assumed that the Führer had been killed and aimed to seize power.
• Mutually Assured Destruction: Triggered when the core territories of a nuclear state are occupied by foreign forces. The exact degree of response and whether a threat actually proceeds to a launch comes down to event decisions, but there is a very high risk of escalation into apocalypse.

---